ay that they knew any just cause or impediment why
they should not forever after hold their peace?" asked Dear Jones.

"How could a ghost, or even two ghosts, keep a girl from marrying the
man she loved?" This was Baby Van Rensselaer's question.

"It seems curious, doesn't it?" and Uncle Larry tried to warm himself by
two or three sharp pulls at his fiery little cigar. "And the
circumstances are quite as curious as the fact itself. You see, Miss
Sutton wouldn't be married for a year after her mother's death, so she
and Duncan had lots of time to tell each other all they knew. Eliphalet,
he got to know a good deal about the girls she went to school with, and
Kitty, she learned all about his family. He didn't tell her about the
title for a long time, as he wasn't one to brag. But he described to her
the little old house at Salem. And one evening toward the end of the
summer, the wedding-day having been appointed for early in September,
she told him that she didn't want to bridal tour at all; she just wanted
to go down to the little old house at Salem to spend her honeymoon in
peace and quiet, with nothing to do and nobody to bother them. Well,
Eliphalet jumped at the suggestion. It suited him down to the ground.
All of a sudden he remembered the spooks, and it knocked him all of a
heap. He had told her about the Duncan Banshee, and the idea of having
an ancestral ghost in personal attendance on her husband tickled her
immensely. But he had never said anything about the ghost which haunted
the little old house at Salem. He knew she would be frightened out of
her wits if the house ghost revealed itself to her, and he saw at once
that it would be impossible to go to Salem on their wedding trip. So he
told her all about it, and how whenever he went to Salem the two ghosts
interfered, and gave dark seances and manifested and materialized and
made the place absolutely impossible. Kitty, she listened in silence,
and Eliphalet, he thought she had changed her mind. But she hadn't done
anything of the kind."

"Just like a man--to think she was going to," remarked Baby Van
Rensselaer.

"She just told him she could not bear ghosts herself, but she would not
marry a man who was afraid of them."

"Just like a girl--to be so inconsistent," remarked Dear Jones.

Uncle Larry's tiny cigar had long been extinct. He lighted a new one,
and continued: "Eliphalet protested in vain. Kitty said her mind was
made up. She was determined to pa