“I opened the door and stepped out in the hall—taking care not to awake Mr. Peyton—and found Clara fully dressed and holding her traveling-bag. It was evident she had dressed in considerable haste, and it was equally plain that she was almost paralyzed with fear.
“‘I just seen a spook!’ she gasped. ‘An old man with white hair and whiskers. He come right in my room while I was asleep. I woke up and seen ’im. And he writ somethin’ on my dresser. You c’n see for yerself, ma’am, what he writ there.’
“Fearful of awakening my husband, I had drawn her away from the bedroom door; and now, with some difficulty, I persuaded her to follow me to her room, where I found, written in white chalk across the bureau mirror, the command: ‘Leave here at once!’
“Clara was determined to obey this ‘message from the dead’ by leaving instantly. I couldn’t induce her even to stay until morning. Despite my protests and entreaties, she fled from the house and passed the remainder of the night, as I later discovered, in the Hubbard Woods railroad station, taking an early train for Chicago.
“I tried to keep the occurrence from my husband, inventing an excuse for Clara’s hasty departure, but he wormed the truth from me, and of course that further harassed his already overwrought nerves. Also, it gave him the right to say, ‘I told you so!’
“He renewed his pleading to abandon the house; but I still refused to give it up—still refused to admit that it was ‘haunted,’ or that there was anything supernatural in what he and Clara had seen.
“It didn’t end there, unhappily. On the very next night—that was night before last—the houseman was visited by the mysterious ‘thing.’ He said he saw it in his room, after midnight, stooping over his table, that he shouted at it and it disappeared. Then, so he told us, he got up and struck a light and discovered the ‘ghost’ had been trying to send a message to him by arranging some matches on the table.
“He showed us these matches, saying he had left them just as they were found. They were so placed as to spell the word, ‘LEAVE,’ in capital letters. Evidently the ‘ghost’ was frightened away before he could finish his sentence. Needless to say, the houseman left us.
“Well, in spite of all these things, I simply couldn’t bring myself to believe that the mysterious visitations were supernatural. I was sure there must be some logical explanation. But last night—!”