script to Sir Robert's letter, in which he said, "I
think, in Mrs. ----'s place, I would say nothing to the little girl of
what we have discovered."

And I have never done so.

This is all I have to tell. I offer no suggestions, no theories in
explanation of the facts. Those who, like Sir Robert Masters, are able
and desirous to treat such subjects scientifically or philosophically
will doubtless form their own. I cannot say that I find _his_ theory a
perfectly satisfactory one, perhaps I do not sufficiently understand it,
but I have tried to give it in his own words. Should this matter-of-fact
relation of a curious experience meet his eyes, I am sure he will forgive
my having brought him into it. Besides, it is not likely that he
would be recognised; men, and women too, of "peculiar ideas," sincere
investigators and honest searchers after truth, as well as their
superficial plagiarists, being by no means rare in these days.

IV

THE STORY OF THE RIPPLING TRAIN

"Let's tell ghost stories, then," said Gladys.

"Aren't you tired of them? One hears nothing else nowadays. And they're
all 'authentic,' really vouched for, only you never see the person
who saw or heard or felt the ghost. It is always somebody's sister or
cousin, or friend's friend," objected young Mrs. Snowdon, another of the
guests at the Quarries.

"I don't know that that is quite a reasonable ground for discrediting
them _en masse_," said her husband. "It is natural enough, indeed
inevitable, that the principal or principals in such cases should be
much more rarely come across than the stories themselves. A hundred
people can repeat the story, but the author, or rather hero, of it,
can't be in a hundred places at once. You don't disbelieve in any other
statement or narrative merely because you have never seen the prime
mover in it?"

"But I didn't say I discredited them on that account," said Mrs.
Snowdon. "You take one up so, Archie. I'm not logical and reasonable;
I don't pretend to be. If I meant anything, it was that a ghost story
would have a great pull over other ghost stories if one could see the
person it happened to. One does get rather provoked at _never_ coming
across him or her," she added a little petulantly.

She was tired; they were all rather tired, for it was the first evening
since the party had assembled at the large country house known as "the
Quarries" on which there was not to be dancing, with the additional
fatigue