evidently chosen this as a good time for her holiday. I wondered idly where she spent it. And now the close, musty smell of the rooms caught at my senses, and I remembered with a positive pang the sweet scent of the earth and the dead leaves in that wood through which, at this very moment, the sensible and fortunate Edmundson would be riding.

The thought of dead leaves reminded me of the heap of correspondence. I glanced through it. Only one of all those letters interested me in the least. It was from my mother:—

I opened both the windows and lit a pipe. Sefton Manor, that gorgeous old place,—I knew its picture in Hasted, cradle of our race, and so on—and a big fortune. I hoped my cousin Selwyn would want the £20,000 more than he wanted the house. If he didn’t—well, perhaps my fortune might be large enough to increase that £20,000 to a sum that he would want.

And then, suddenly, I became aware that this was the 31st of August, and that to-morrow was the day on which I was to meet my cousin Selwyn and “the family,” and come to a decision about the house. I had never, to my knowledge, heard of my cousin Selwyn. We were a family rich in collateral branches. I hoped he would be a reasonable young man. Also, I had never seen Sefton Manor House, except in a print. It occurred to me that I would rather see the house before I saw the cousin.

I caught the next train to Sefton.

“It’s but a mile by the field way,” said the railway porter. “You take the stile—the first on the left—and follow the path till you come to the wood. Then skirt along the left of it, cater across the meadow at the end, and you’ll see the place right below you in the vale.”

“It’s a fine old place, I hear,” said I.

“All to pieces, though,” said he. “I shouldn’t wonder if it cost a couple o’ hundred to put it to rights. Water coming through the roof and all.”

“But surely the owner——”

“Oh, he never lived there; not since his son was taken. He lived in the lodge; it’s on the brow of the hill looking down on the Manor House.”

“Is the house empty?”

“As empty as a rotten nutshell, except for the old sticks o’ furniture. Any one who likes,” added the porter, “can lie there o’ nights. But it wouldn’t be me!”

“Do you mean there’s a ghost?” I hope I kept any note of undue elation out of my voice.

“I don’t hold with ghosts,” said the porter firmly, “but my aunt was in service at the lodge, and there’s no doubt but something walks there.”

“Come,” I said, “this is very interesting. Can’t you leave the station, and come across to where beer is?”

“I don’t mind if I do,” said he. “That is so far as your standing a drop goes. But I can’t leave the station, so if you pour my beer you must pour it dry, sir, as the saying is.”

So I gave the man a shilling, and he told me about the ghost at Sefton Manor House. Indeed, about the ghosts, for there were, it seemed, two; a lady in white, and a gentleman in a slouch hat and black riding cloak.

“They do say,” said my porter, “as how one of the young ladies once on a time was wishful to elope, and started so to do—not getting further than the hall door; her father, thinking it to be burglars, fired out of the window, and the happy pair fell on the doorstep, corpses.”

“Is it true, do you think?”

The porter did not know. At any rate there was a tablet in the church to Maria Sefton and George Ballard—“and something about in their death them not being divided.”

I took the stile, I skirted the wood, I “catered” across the meadow—and so I came out on a chalky ridge held in a net of pine roots, where dog violets grew. Below stretched the green park, dotted with trees. The lodge, stuccoed but solid, lay below me. Smoke came from its chimneys. Lower still lay the Manor House—red brick with grey lichened mullions, a house in a thousand, Elizabethan—and from its twisted beautiful chimneys no smoke arose. I hurried across the short turf towards the Manor House.

I had no difficulty in getting into the great garden. The bricks of the wall were everywhere displaced or crumbling. The ivy had forced the coping stones away; each red buttress offered a dozen spots for foothold. I climbed the wall and found myself in a garden—oh! but such a garden. There are not half a dozen such in England—ancient box hedges, rosaries, fountains, yew tree avenues, bowers of clematis (now feathery in its seeding time), great trees, grey-grown marble balustrades and steps, terraces, green lawns, one green lawn, in especial, girt round with a sweet briar hedge, and in the middle of this lawn a sundial. All this was mine, or, to be more exact, might be mine, should my cousin Selwyn prove to be a person of sense. How I prayed that he might not be a person of taste! That he might be a person who liked yachts or racehorses or diamonds, or motor-cars, or anything that money can buy, not a person who liked beautiful Elizabethan houses, and gardens old beyond belief.

The sundial stood on a mass of masonry, too low and wide to be called a pillar. I mounted the two brick steps and leaned over to read the date and the motto:

The date was 1617, the initials S. S. surmounted it. The face of the dial was unusually ornate—a wreath of stiffly drawn roses was traced outside the circle of the numbers. As I leaned there a sudden movement on the other side of the pedestal compelled my attention. I leaned over a little further to see what had rustled—a rat—a rabbit? A flash of pink struck at my eyes. A lady in a pink dress was sitting on the step at the other side of the sundial.

I suppose some exclamation escaped me—the lady looked up. Her hair was dark, and her eyes; her face was pink and white, with a few little gold-coloured freckles on nose and on cheek bones. Her dress was of pink cotton stuff, thin