“That’s another thing,” said Sabrina, along her own line of argument, and she paused with a long spray of delphinium in her hands. “What do you think, Muffin, does Bella see him?”

“You bet she does! We make faces at each other!” said Hilary.

“It seems hardly fair,” she pondered, “when I can’t see him.”

“Ah, but I can see you!” he told her gallantly.

She was wrapping up the faded flowers neatly in the newspaper to take away downstairs. She put the newly filled vases back in their places, and took a dust-cloth out of the desk drawer.

“I must say he’s a very tidy person to keep house for,” she remarked. “No cigarette ash scattered about, no laundry to send away, no—”

She stood still, looking down at the seat of the arm chair under the reading-light. A book lay there—a book she had never taken off the shelf. And the loose silk cushion was crumpled down into the corner against the arm.

“Wrong again,” said Hilary uneasily. “I’m getting careless. I meant to put it back.”

Once more there had come that paralyzing upheaval in her inside, fading into delicious lassitude and a sense of deep satisfaction and relief. Hilary. He was here, he was real, she had not imagined him, nothing mattered but that. Once more the impulse came to find him—make even surer of him—somehow to see him. She swung round towards the window seat—and then shyness again, a retreat into good manners. Behave sensibly, Sabrina, he can see you. Behave as though it was not unusual of him to leave things lying about. He has as good a right as anyone to put down a book wherever he chooses. Be tactful, Sabrina, and never let him know how your silly tummy acts when these things happen. Take it in your stride, Sabrina, he expects it of you. Take it the way Mrs. Pilton does, as though it was his own affair if he prefers not to be seen.

Therefore, after that moment’s pause, almost automatically she reached for the cushion and plumped it and set it back in place. Then, more slowly, she picked up the book he had been reading. It was black, with its title in gold letters—True Ghost Stories.

“We haven’t read this one, Muffin,” she remarked very casually, and only her eyes betrayed her, large and brightly blue, with languid lids. “I wonder if it’s any good.”

“Well, I didn’t find it very helpful,” Hilary admitted, adoring her gameness, infinitely proud of her nervous take-up, pleased beyond all reason at how she took him in her stride and behaved superbly as though there was nothing unusual about him at all. “I was hoping to learn something about the technique. The trouble is, they all take their haunting so seriously. It’s too bad I haven’t got some chains to rattle!”