ing was still far from clear.

"To put it as mildly as possible," she murmured, "the thing verges upon
the uncanny"; and, leaning forward upon her silken knees, she attended
upon the phenomenon.

At first it had seemed like some faint and unexplained atmospheric
derangement, occasioned, apparently, neither by an opened window nor by
a door. Some papers fluttered to the floor, the fringes of the hangings
softly waved, and, indeed, it would still have been easy to dismiss the
matter as the effect of a vagrant draft had not the state of things
suddenly grown unmistakably unusual. All the air of the room, it then
appeared, rushed even with violence to the point and there underwent
what impressed her as an aerial convulsion, in the very midst and
well-spring of which, so great was the confusion, there seemed to appear
at intervals almost the semblance of a shape.

The silence of the room was disturbed by a book that flew open with
fluttering leaves, the noise of a vase of violets blown over, from which
the perfumed water dripped to the floor, and soft touchings all around
as of a breeze passing through a chamber full of trifles.

The ringlets of the Lady's hair were swept forward toward the corner
upon which her gaze was fixed, and in which the conditions had now grown
so tense with imminent occurrence and so rent with some inconceivable
throe that she involuntarily rose, and, stepping forward against the
pressure of her petticoats which were blown about her ankles, she
impatiently thrust her hand into the----

She was immediately aware that another hand had received it, though with
a far from substantial envelopment, and for another moment what she saw
before her trembled between something and nothing. Then from the
precarious situation there slowly emerged into dubious view the shape of
a young man dressed in evening clothes over which was flung a mantle of
voluminous folds such as is worn by ghosts of fashion.

"The very deuce was in it!" he complained; "I thought I should never
materialize."

She flung herself into her chair, confounded; yet, even in the shock of
the emergency, true to herself, she did not fail to smooth her ruffled
locks.

Her visitor had been scanning his person in a dissatisfied way, and with
some vexation he now ejaculated: "Beg your pardon, my dear, but are my
feet on the floor, or where in thunder are they?"

It was with a tone of reassurance that she confessed that his
patent-leathers w