ort to confide her
strange, terrifying experience to this kind new friend.

"I'd rather tell you, I think."

She waited a moment, and then came out with a bald statement of what had
happened. "I was sitting knitting, when something seemed to force me to
look up--and I saw, or I thought I saw, the spirit of a dear, dead
friend."

Sir Lyon uttered an exclamation of extreme astonishment.

"Yes, I know it was only my imagination," Helen went on in a low,
troubled voice. "But it gave me a most fearful shock, and I feel that,
however long I live, I shall never forget it!"

"I wish you would tell me a little more about it," he said persuasively.
"I don't ask out of idle curiosity. I was very much impressed by what
happened on the first night of our visit here--I mean at the seance."

"So was I," she said reluctantly. "But, of course, this had nothing to
do with--with anything of that sort. In fact, Bubbles (as she has asked
me to call her) was sitting, asleep, I think, in that curious old carved
confessional box. My aunt and Mr. Varick were reading--Mr. Varick had
just come up from the village with this morning's London papers; Miss
Farrow was doing her embroidery, and I'd just been counting some
stitches in my knitting, when I looked up and saw--"

She stopped, as if not able to go on.

"Was what you saw, what you took to be an apparition, close to the
confessional?" asked Sir Lyon abruptly.

"No, not so very close--still, not very far away. It--she--seemed to be
standing behind Mr. Varick, a little to his left, on the door side."

"I suppose you would rather not tell me who it was you saw?"

Sir Lyon thought he knew, but he wished to feel sure.

"I don't see why I shouldn't tell you," yet she hesitated. "It was poor
Milly, Sir Lyon--I mean Mrs. Lionel Varick. She and I became great
friends during the weeks preceding her death. She even told me that,
apart from her husband, she had never cared for anyone as she grew to
care for me. And yet--oh, Sir Lyon, what was so very, very terrible just
now, was that I felt her looking at me with a kind of hatred in her dead
face," and, as she uttered these last words, an expression of deep pain
came over Helen Brabazon's countenance.

Sir Lyon then asked a rather curious question: "How was the apparition
clothed?"

"In her shroud. A woman in Redsands made it. I saw the woman about
it--perhaps that impressed it on my mind," her mouth quivered. "The
figure standing there w