oud worth mention in the blue;
only one phrase in a minor key. The old familiar figure of "the
Major"--intermittent, certainly, but none the less invariable; making
the house his own, or letting it appropriate him, hard to say
which--was no longer to be seen; but the old sword had been hung in
a place of honour near a portrait of Paul Nightingale, Mrs. Fenwick's
stepfather--its old owner's school-friend of seventy years ago. At her
death it was to be offered to the school; no surviving relative was
named in the will, if any existed. Everything was left unconditionally
"to my dear daughter by adoption, Rosalind Nightingale."

Some redistributions of furniture were involved in the importation of
the movables from the two rooms in Ball Street. The black cabinet, or
cellaret, with the eagle-talons, found a place in the dining-room in
the basement into which Fenwick--only it seems so odd to go back to
it now--was brought on the afternoon of his electrocution. Sally always
thought of this cabinet as "Major Roper's cabinet," because she got
the whiskey from it for him before he went off in the fog. If only
she had made him drunk that evening! Who knows but it might have
enabled him to fight against that terrible heart-failure that was not
the result of atmospheric conditions. She never looked at this cabinet
but the thought passed through her mind.

Her mother certainly told her nothing at this time about her last
conversation with the Colonel, or almost nothing. Certainly she
mentioned more than once what she thought a curious circumstance--that
the invalid, who was utterly ignorant of Old Jack's death, had
persisted so strongly that he was present in the room when he must
have been dead some hours. Every one of us has his little bit of
Psychical Research, which he demands respect for from others, whose
own cherished private instances he dismisses without investigation.
This example became Mrs. Fenwick's; who, to be just, had not set
herself up with one previously, in spite of the temptation the
Anglo-Indian is always under to espouse Mahatmas and buried Faquirs
and the like. There seemed a good prospect that it would become
an article of faith with her; her first verdict--that it was an
hallucination--having been undermined by a certain contradictiousness,
produced in her by an undeserved discredit poured on it by pretenders
to a superior ghost-insight; who, after all, tried to utilise it
afterward as a peg to hang their o