“Is it so bad as that?” Hewson gasped.
“Yes, it is. It’s so bad that sometimes I can’t realize it. Do you actually mean to tell me, Hewson that you saw a ghost in my house?”
“I never said a ghost. I said an apparition. I don’t know what it was. It may have been an optical delusion. I call it an apparition, because that’s the shortest way out. You know I’m not a spiritualist.”
“Yes, that’s the devil of it,” said St. John. “That’s the very thing that makes people believe it _is_ a ghost. There isn’t one of them that don’t say to himself and the other fellows that if a cool, clear-headed chap like you saw something queer, it _must_ have been a ghost; and so they go on knocking my house down in price till I don’t believe it would fetch fifteen hundred under the hammer to-morrow. It’s simply ruin to me.”
“Ruin?” Hewson echoed.
“Yes, ruin,” St. John repeated. “Before this thing came out I refused twenty-five thousand for the place, because I knew I could get twenty-eight thousand. Now I couldn’t get twenty-eight hundred. Couldn’t you understand that the reputation of being haunted simply plays the devil with a piece of property?” “Yes; yes, I did understand that, and for that very reason I was always careful--”
“Careful! To tell people that you had seen a ghost in my house?”
“No! _Not_ to tell them where I had seen a ghost. I never--”
“How did it get out then?”
“I,” Hewson began, and then he stood with his mouth open, unable to close it for the articulation of the next word, which he at last huskily whispered forth, “can’t tell you.”