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  Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had been struck by a note of flatness in Alida’s answering hilarity.

  ‘Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.’

  ‘Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?’

  His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back, tantalizing: ‘Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.’

  ‘Never know it?’ Boyne pulled her up. ‘But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?’

  ‘I can’t say. But that’s the story.’

  ‘That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?’

  ‘Well – not till afterward, at any rate.’

  ‘Till afterward?’

  ‘Not till long, long afterward.’

  ‘But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t its signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?’

  Alida could only shake her head. ‘Don’t ask me. But it has.’

  ‘And then suddenly’ – Mary spoke up as if from cavernous depths of divination – ‘suddenly, long afterward, one says to oneself, “That was it!”’

  She was startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida’s pupils. ‘I suppose so. One just has to wait.’

  ‘Oh, hang waiting!’ Ned broke in. ‘Life’s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can’t we do better than that, Mary?’

  But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months of their conversation with Mrs Stair they were settled at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for, to the point of planning it in advance in all its daily details, had actually begun for them.

  It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded fire-place, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkened to a deeper solitude; it was for the ultimate indulgence from such sensations that Mary Boyne, abruptly exiled from New York by her husband’s business, had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and gardening (against a background of grey walls), he dreamed of the production of his long-planned book on the Economic Basis of Culture; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered: they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past.

  Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by an air of remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island – a nest of counties, as they put it – that for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.

  ‘It’s that,’ Ned had once enthusiastically explained, ‘that gives such depth to their efforts, such relief to their contrasts. They’ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every delicious mouthful.’

  The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old house hidden under a shoulder of the downs had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more completely in its special charm – the charm of having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the mysterious stir of intenser memories.

  The feeling had never been stronger than on this particular afternoon when, waiting in the library for the lamps to come, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred to go alone; and, in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning’s work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had thought it would, and there were lines of perplexity between his eyes such as had never been there in his engineering days. He had often, then, looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of ‘worry’ had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her – the introduction, and a summary of the opening chapter – showed a firm hold on his subject, and an increasing confidence in his powers.

  The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with ‘business’ and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible source of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then? But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier and fresher-eyed. It was only within the last week that she had felt in him the undefinable change which made her restless in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a secret to keep from him!

  The thought that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the long room.

  ‘Can it be the house?’ she mused.

  The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the row of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hearth.

  ‘Why, of course – the house is haunted!’ she reflected.

  The ghost – Alida’s imperceptible ghost – after figuring largely in the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually left aside as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her rural neighbours, but, beyond a vague ‘They du say so, ma’am,’ the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive spectre had apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

  ‘And I suppose, poor ineffectual demon, that’s why it beats its beautiful wings in vain in the void,’ Mary had laughingly concluded.

  ‘Or, rather,’ Ned answered in the same strain, ‘why, amid so much that’s ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as the ghost.’ And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous enough to make them soon unaware of the loss.

  Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning – a sense gradually acquired through daily contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own past; if one could only get into close enough communion with the house one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on one’s own account. Perhaps, in his long hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired it already, and was silently carrying about the weight of whatever it had revealed to him. M