nurse, I believe, when
she was a child, and had seen her grow up, and was very much attached
to her, and all that. Like all those old servants she was pretty well
spoilt, I imagine, and seems to have had the girl under her thumb. She
always slept in the room with her. Now; the maid had bad headaches and
used to take all sorts of proprietary remedies for them--coal-tar, of
course, and probably had weakened her heart with them. Anyway, she
waked the girl up one night with her troubles and the girl gets up and
gives her an overdose in the dark, and the maid's dead in her bed in
the morning."

"Oh, I see," I said, trying to make up for my nasty attitude about that
suicidal woman. "So she's blue about it, and thinks she's to blame.
An automobile trip will certainly do her a lot of good."

"Well, there's a little more to it than that," he said. "As a matter
of fact, she's a very sensible sort of girl and she knows she's not to
blame, really. Of course it was pretty rough, but then, the maid had
no business to expect her to wait on her, and she ought to have given
careful directions about the dose, anyhow. She might have gone off any
time, and the girl knows it. But the night of the funeral, after the
girl was in bed, what does she see but the maid sitting on the foot of
the bed, looking at her! Of course she was overwrought nervously.
Only the trouble is, this was three months ago, and she swears the
woman comes every night. She knows it's hallucination, optical
delusion, anything you like, and she tries to treat it as such, but
she's beginning to break down under it, and I don't know what to do.
They've travelled, they've had her in a sanitarium, they've tried
auto-suggestion--no use. She's all right through the day, but at
night, in any bedroom, under any circumstances, this thing appears and
she just has to go through with it till morning."

"Why doesn't she have some one sleep with her?" I asked.

"It doesn't make the slightest difference," he said. "One week she had
a bed between her father's and mother's, but it was just the same, and
of course they got pretty bad, out of sympathy. They'd spend two or
three ordinary fortunes to cure her--but it's one of the cases where
money doesn't talk, unfortunately. So there we are. It came over me
last night that I'd like to have you try what you can do with her."

"But, heavens and earth, what good will I be?" I said. "Am I a
ghost-catcher? I never knew it.