“And these days,” I pressed on, fastening to my little narrative, “I find myself cherishing this house desperately, and cherishing as well all my mortal connections. My Aunt Queen I cherish above all. But there are others, others who must never know what I am.”

He studied me patiently, as if pondering these things.

“Your conscience is tuned like a violin,” he said pensively. “Do you really like having them here, the strangers, the Christmas and Easter guests, under your own roof?”

“It’s cheerful,” I admitted. “There’s always light and movement. There are voices and the dull vibration of the busy stairs. Sometimes guests complain—the grits is watery or the gravy is lumpy—and in the old days, my grandmother Sweetheart would cry over those complaints, and my grandfather—Pops, we all called him—would privately slam his fist down on the kitchen table; but in the main, the guests love the place . . .

“. . . And now and then it can be lonesome here, melancholy and dismal, no matter how bright the chandeliers. I think that when my grandparents died and that part of it was all over I felt a . . . a deep depression that seemed linked to Blackwood Manor, though I couldn’t leave it, and wouldn’t of my own accord.”

He nodded at these words as though he understood them. He was looking at me as surely as I was looking at him. He was appraising me as surely as I appraised him.

I was thinking how very attractive he was, I couldn’t stop myself, with his yellow hair so thick and long, turning so gracefully at the collar of his coat, and his large probing violet eyes. There are very few creatures on earth who have true violet eyes. The slight difference between his eyes meant nothing. His sun-browned skin was flawless. What he saw in me with his questioning gaze, I couldn’t know.

“You know, you can roam about this house,” I said, still vaguely shocked that I had his interest, the words spilling anxiously from me again. “You can roam from room to room, and there are ghosts. Sometimes even the tourists see the ghosts.”

“Did that scare them?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

“Oh, no, they’re too gung ho to be in a haunted house. They love it. They see things where there are no things. They ask to be left alone in haunted rooms.”

He laughed silently.

“They claim to hear bells ring that aren’t ringing,” I went on, smiling back at him, “and they smell coffee when there is no coffee, and they catch the drift of exotic perfumes. Now and then there was a tourist or two who was genuinely frightened, in fact there were several in the bed-and-board days who packed up immediately, but in the main, the reputation of the place sold it. And then, of course, there were those who actually saw ghosts.”

“And you, you do see the ghosts,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “Most of the ghosts are weak things, hardly more than vapor, but there are exceptions. . . .” I hesitated. I was lost for a moment. I felt my words might trigger some awful apparition, but I wanted so to confide in him. Stumbling, I went on: