are many ghosts that haunt the House by the Sea. Jay is, of
course, one of them, and for this reason she knows more about ghosts than
any one I know. Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her. She
knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out
your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your
hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your
throat to your heart. She knows how you may go between trees in the
moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping
pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may
say some silly greeting that only your friend understands. And how your
heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply. She knows how,
walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some
Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the
Thames. These are the ghost stories that never get told. Few people can
read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the
dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of
the _Morning Post_. But Jay knows, because of her intimacy with the House
by the Sea. There she meets her fellow-ghosts.

The House, as I told you, has hardly any garden; having the sea, it
doesn't need one. But there is a little formal place about twenty paces
across, set, as it were, in the heart of the House. A small prim square,
bounded on the north, south and east by the House itself, and on the west
by the cliff and the sea. There is a stone balustrade to divide the
garden from space. In the middle of the square is a stone basin with
becalmed water-lilies and of course goldfish. Round the basin the orderly
ranks of little clipped box hedges manoeuvre. The untamed elements in the
garden are the climbing things, they sing in gold and yellow and orange
and red from the walls. The only official way into the garden is a door
from the House, a bald door without eyebrows, so to speak, like all the
doors and windows in the House. But there is an unofficial way into the
garden, and Jay found her Secret Friend there. This is the short cut to
the sea. In other words, it is a wriggly ladder, one end of which you
attach to a hook in the wall, and the other you throw over the balustrade
down the cliff to the sea. It is a long way to walk round the House and
along the cliff and down to the sea by the path. And just as