their questions if I can."

"Won't it be something of an intellectual strain?"

"Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the
thing to go off. What do you think?"

"I think it's fine. Are you going to give it out, so that they can be
studying up their questions?"

"No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or, at least, the first
one has. Of course, after the scheme has once been given away, the
ghost-seers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to
stand it."

"I think it's great. Are you going to let me have a chance with a
question?"

"Are you going to see a ghost?"

"To be sure I am. May I really ask it what I please?"

"If you're honest."

"Oh, I shall be honest--"

He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any
meaning for his abruptness. "I'm awfully glad you like the idea," she
said, "I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven't
been quite certain that the question-asking wasn't rather silly, or, at
least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so much, Mr. Verrian."

"I've thought of my question," he began again, as abruptly as he had
stopped before. "May I ask it now?"

Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed
coming nearer.

"Oh, I mustn't be seen!" Miss Shirley lamented. "Oh, dear! If I'm seen
the whole thing is given away. What shall I do?" She whirled about and
ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.

He ran after her. "My question is, May I come to see you when you get
back to town?"

"Yes, certainly. But don't come now! You mustn't be seen with me! I'm
not supposed to be in the house at all."

If Verrian's present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred
to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to
cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could
dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she
was to take in her projected entertainment. But he was reduced from the
exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly
conscious of her pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her
frail prettiness no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which
she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her
undecided blondness--from her dust-colored hair, for instance--as
from the entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their
conv