“Would you go through it all over again?” he asked her, knowing her answer ere he spoke.
“Over and over again, if it had to be—but God is merciful to lovers,” she replied. “I have learnt that thinking—thinking how it all happened.”
“I too,” he said. Few things there were that these two had not thought together, though time and ocean rolled between.
London claimed them, and work and their new home. Mr. Campbell invited himself to supper on the evening of their arrival.
“The living image of you, Baker,” he said, when Jimmy, junior, was introduced, “the living image!” And then, “I want you to stay on with us in Bermondsey; you can have a share—call it ‘Campbell & Baker,’ shall we, Mamie?” For the old ruffian had insisted on addressing Mamie by her Christian name.
The offer was accepted, and in parting, “Only one man in a thousand could have done what you have done,” said Mr. Campbell; “and only one woman in a hundred thousand, Mamie. You’ve done the impossible; you’re geniuses,” he ended, laughing at them; and, as an afterthought, “If my boy ever gets married on the quiet and plays the fool, I’ll break his blethering neck for him!”
The Ghost that Failed
By Desmond Coke
Loyal North Lancashire Regiment
The Blue Lady wailed disconsolately in the panelled room.
In her mortal life, four hundred years before, she had always been somewhat behind the times; and now she was in arrears by the space of a whole Silly Season. She was grappling with the stale problem, “Do we Believe?”
The Blue Lady concluded, emphatically, that we did not believe; and hence her wailing. She had seen the age of scepticism coming. For more than three hundred glad years men had crossed themselves and shuddered when she went moaning through the sombre rooms of Yewcroft Hall. Secure in her reputation, she had been content once only in the evening to interrupt the revelry, and then, conscious that all eyes had been upon her stately progress, to seek contentedly her spectral couch. But with the growth of science had risen also disbelief. Once stage-coaches were discarded, and people came to Yewcroft by a steam-drawn train, she felt that any other marvel must lose caste. She did not fail to observe that, as she passed along the rooms, there were those who, though they trembled, would not turn, and made pretence of not observing her. Then came the hideous day on which the Hall harboured a deputation from a Society of Research, who loaded themselves with cameras, dull books, and revolvers, before spending a night in the Panelled Room. The Blue Lady, as became a self-respecting ghost, slept elsewhere, and would not show herself to these ill-mannered creatures; so that next day the Press declared the famous Yewcroft ghost to be a myth. This was terrible; but far worse was to come.