With an energetic shrug, as if to shake off his odd mood, he sealed the report in an envelope, and put it in his pocket and started for an office building in lower Michigan Avenue.
Presently he entered a room in this building, luxuriously furnished and unoccupied, and abruptly halted. In the adjoining room he could hear the voices of Scott Peyton and his wife; and since the door between the two offices stood partly open, he could also see their faces. Himself unobserved, Barry stood silently watching and listening.
“I suppose you’re right, Scott,” she said, standing beside her husband’s desk and looking down at him. “After what happened last night, I’m just about ready to do as you say—give the house up and move back to town. But I do so hate to leave that old place. I wish—”
“Why should you?” he interrupted, scowling at his desk and avoiding her eyes.
Mrs. Peyton looked down, biting a corner of her lip and twisting the wedding ring of her finger.
“It’s not so much what I want,” she faltered, her voice tremulously low, “but—the city is no place—not the best place for our—Oh, Scott!” she cried passionately, and flung out her hands to him in appeal. “Can’t you see?”
Scott Peyton looked up and met his wife’s eyes; and the thing he saw in their liquid brown depths instantly chased the frown from his face and took him to his feet in a swift rush of remorse and gladness.
In the next instant she was sobbing in his arms; and he was tenderly patting her shoulders and saying soothingly:
“It’s all right, honey. We won’t give the place up. I don’t think—the ghost—will bother us again....”
At this juncture Barry quietly departed.