“It might easily be that,” Verrian assented.
“Oh, may I ask it something now?” a girl’s voice appealed to Bushwick. It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle’s guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a child’s unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened, there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at, but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.
“Oh, dear!” Miss Macroyd whispered. “What is that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder?”
Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and doubted.
The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her place round to the ghost’s in a haste that expressed a fear that it might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more simply.
She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. “Oh, I don’t know how to begin,” she said, quite as if she and the phantom were alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a sense of its human quality. “But you will understand, won’t you! You’ll think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I’m going to be serious—”
The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than before. “It’s about the—the truth. Do you think if sometimes we don’t tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?”
“I don’t understand,” the phantom answered. “Say it again—or differently.”
“Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?”
“Never!” the ghost answered, with a passion that thrilled to Verrian’s heart.