“I was forced to amuse myself. To be buried in this provincial spot after Prague, Vienna, Budapest was not easy for a spoiled young girl. My husband loved his home and would not leave it. I painted, embroidered, studied music; but these soon pall.”

“Especially when one has mastered them,” Tony said. It was a reluctant compliment, and not an empty one. I too was sure the old lady could master anything she attempted. She acknowledged his courtesy with a chilly smile.

“So then I turned to a study of genealogy. As a professor of history, you will understand its fascination. Are you making progress with your research into the Peasants’ Revolt, and Count Burckhardt?”

“I’ve been to the town archives.” Tony eyed the woman with what he obviously thought was a look of fiendish cunning. “I imagine you’ve used them too.”

“Oh, yes. I know the story of the Countess Konstanze’s death.”

“Does your niece know it?” I asked.

“She does not. She is already sufficiently unbalanced on that subject.”

Tony was turning red—a sure sign that he was about to lose his temper.

“Irma must know the story,” he said. “How else can you account for what she said in the séance?”

“Must I account for it? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ as your poet so cleverly puts it.”

“Rrrr,” said Tony. He turned the growl into a cough. “I would be more willing to admit the supernatural if there were some quasilogical reason for a haunting. Even a specter has to have a raison d’être. You surely know the classic explanations—unexpiated crime, for instance.”

“How clever!” exclaimed the Gräfin. “But what of innocence abused and unavenged? Konstanze was falsely accused—”

“Naturally.”

“Yes, we moderns know the folly of the witchcraft persecution. Yet her fate was not surprising. She was a learned woman who had been educated by a family priest in her home near Granada. His lessons apparently gave her ideas which were, in that day, dangerously heretical. It is said that she was in communication with Trithemius, at Würzburg.”

“That must be apocryphal,” Tony said. “Trithemius died in fifteen hundred sixteen. But that doesn’t account for the lady’s restlessness. She can’t be worried about her reputation; we know she was innocent. And I’m afraid we’re in no position to punish her persecutors, or give her Christian burial.”

He looked at his hostess with the candid wide-eyed stare that had brought out the motherly instinct in many middle-aged ladies. I could have told him it wouldn’t work; the Gräfin had about as much maternal instinct as a guppy. She smiled gently.

“It is very mysterious.”