e had been engaged in
giving the girl a few last directions as to how a lighted candle was to
be left out for her in her hall, for she had brought her latchkey with
her. After ringing the bell, the lady and her maid had moved away from
the door a little way, and Timmy, staring out at the two figures, who
stood illumined by the hall light out on the gravel carriage drive, had
seen Something Else.

He did not invariably see Mrs. Crofton accompanied or companioned by that
of which he had spoken to his mother. Sometimes days would go by and he
would see nothing, though he was a constant, if never a welcome, visitor
at The Trellis House.

Then all at once, sometimes when she was in the garden, at other times
in the charming little parlour, Timmy would see the wraith of Colonel
Crofton, and the wraith of Colonel Crofton's terrier, Dandy, looking as
real as the flesh-and-blood woman beside whom they seemed to stand.
Sometimes they appeared, as it were, intermittently, but now and again
they would stay quite a long time.

As long as he could remember, Timmy had been aware of what Nanna
expressed by the phrase "things that were not there," and he was so
accustomed to the phenomena that it did not impress his own mind as
anything very much out of the way, or strange.

Dr. O'Farrell had always shown a keen interest in Timmy's alleged visions
and presentiments. Like so many country doctors of the old school, he
was a man not only of great natural shrewdness, but of considerable
intellectual curiosity, and, from his point of view, by far the most
inexplicable of the little boy's assertions had concerned a long vanished
building which had stood, for something like three centuries, close to
the parish church, right on the main street of the village.

One Easter Sunday, Timmy, coming out of church, had excitedly exclaimed
that he saw to his right a house where no house had been up to yesterday.
His sisters had laughed at him and his mother had snubbed him. But when
Janet had told Dr. O'Farrell of her little boy's latest and most peculiar
claim to having seen something which was not there, the doctor had gone
home and looked up an old county history, to find that up to Waterloo
year there had still been standing in the pretty little hamlet of
Beechfield, a small Elizabethan manor-house which had figured in the
Titus Oates conspiracy.

* * * * *

But to return to the evening of Mrs. Crofton's second