aid Sanderson. "Where is it?"

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in
America, shouted, "CAUGHT a ghost, did you, Clayton? I'm glad of it!
Tell us all about it right now."

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. "There's no eavesdropping of course, but
we don't want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours of
ghosts in the place. There's too much shadow and oak panelling to trifle
with that. And this, you know, wasn't a regular ghost. I don't think it
will come again--ever."

"You mean to say you didn't keep it?" said Sanderson.

"I hadn't the heart to," said Clayton.

And Sanderson said he was surprised.

We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. "I know," he said, with the
flicker of a smile, "but the fact is it really WAS a ghost, and I'm as
sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now. I'm not joking. I mean
what I say."

Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton, and
then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.

Clayton ignored the comment. "It is the strangest thing that has ever
happened in my life. You know, I never believed in ghosts or anything of
the sort, before, ever; and then, you know, I bag one in a corner; and
the whole business is in my hands."

He meditated still more profoundly, and produced and began to pierce a
second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.

"You talked to it?" asked Wish.

"For the space, probably, of an hour."

"Chatty?" I said, joining the party of the sceptics.

"The poor devil was in trouble," said Clayton, bowed over his cigar-end
and with the very faintest note of reproof.

"Sobbing?" some one asked.

Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. "Good Lord!" he said;
"yes." And then, "Poor fellow! yes."

"Where did you strike it?" asked Evans, in his best American accent.

"I never realised," said Clayton, ignoring him, "the poor sort of thing
a ghost might be," and he hung us up again for a time, while he sought
for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed to his cigar.

"I took an advantage," he reflected at last.

We were none of us in a hurry. "A character," he said, "remains just the
same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too
often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may
have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose--most haun