wn upon your slumbers, you female gourmand. Ghosts
indeed!"

And he stamped out of the room in high dudgeon. His tirade was wholly
lost upon his sister, however, for that lady was whimpering
comfortably and putting all her feeble energy into the effort.

Cora glanced up as the door banged after her lord and master, and
ordered the servants back to bed. Then she turned toward Celine,
saying:

"That door was certainly not locked when we came to it, for I was here
even sooner than Mr. Arthur."

Celine smiled again: "Mademoiselle dismissed me before she had
finished her luncheon. I had disrobed her previously, and she said she
should retire as soon as she drank her coffee. She may have forgotten
the door."

Cora turned toward the bed. "Did you lock your door, Ellen?"

But Ellen did not know; she could not remember if she had or had not.

Then Cora said to Celine: "I am glad to find you so sensible. We shall
have hard work now to convince those ridiculous servants that there is
not a ghost in every corner."

"I do not think that graves open," replied the girl, seriously.

Then she gave her undivided attention to her mistress, who bade fair
to be hysterical for the rest of the night.

Miss Arthur would not be left alone again. No argument could convince
her that the specter was born of her imagination, and therefore not
likely to return. So Cora bade Celine prepare to spend the remainder
of the night in Miss Arthur's dressing room.

Accordingly, Celine withdrew to her own apartment, where her
preparations were made as follows:

First, she shook out the folds of a sheet that hung over a chair, and
restored it to its proper place on the bed. Then she removed from her
dressing stand a box of white powder, and brushed away all traces of
said powder from her garments and the floor. Next, she carefully hid
away a key that had fallen to the floor and lay near the classically
folded sheet. These things accomplished, she made a few additions to
her toilet, extinguished the light, locked her door carefully, trying
it afterward to make assurance doubly sure, and retraced her steps to
relieve Cora, who was dutifully sitting by the spinster's bed, and
beginning to shiver in her somewhat scanty drapery.

As the night wore on, and Miss Arthur became calmed and quiet, the
girl lay back in the big dressing chair, gazing into the grate, and
thinking. Her thoughts were sometimes of Claire, sometimes of
Clarence; of the Girards,