"A flute!" she answered, indignantly, "it's a flute, just as much as you are a flute; and for the sake of enlightening your blind understanding, I'll go to the graveyard, night as it is, if you will go with me."
"Very well," I said. "Come on."
So, under the faint light of the crescent moon, we took our way together. Gradually the notes became lower and sadder, and quite died away. I urged my trembling companion to walk faster, lest the ghost should vanish too; and she acceded to my wish with silent alacrity, that convinced me at once of the sincerity of her expressed belief.
Just as we began to ascend the hill, she stopped suddenly, saying,
"There! did you hear that?"
I answered that I heard a noise, but that it was no unusual thing to hear sounds of the sort in an inhabited neighborhood at so early an hour.
It was the latching of the gate at the graveyard. She answered, solemnly.
"As you value your immortal soul, go no further."
In vain I argued, that a ghost would have no need to unlatch the gate. She positively refused to go farther, and with a courage not very habitual to me, I confess, I walked on alone.
"Do you think I don't know that sound?" she called after me. "I would know if I had forgotten everything else. Oh, stop till I tell you! The night Mary Wildermings died," I heard her say; but I knew the sound of the gate as well as she, and would not wait even for a ghost story. I have since wished I had, for I could never afterwards persuade her to reveal it.