Chapter VII

But the next night Irene faced the ghost with an expression of contempt that might have withered the spirit of Hamlet's sire.

"So you think it proper to deceive a lady?" she inquired scornfully. "Is that the way in which the gentlemen of the 'old school,' of which we hear so much, behaved?"

"Why, you should reflect," the wraith responded waveringly, "that you had made me intoxicated." And, indeed, the poor spirit still showed the effects of its debauch.

"You cannot have been very thoroughly intoxicated," Irene returned, "or you would not have been able to deceive me."

"But you see," it answered, "that I drank only the ghost of wine, so that I really had only the ghost of inebriation."

"But being a ghost yourself," was her reply, "that should have been enough to intoxicate you completely."

"I never argue with a lady," said the ghost loftily, the subject evidently being too complicated for it to follow further. "At least I managed to put you as far as possible on the wrong scent."

As it spoke, it gave the least possible turn of its eye toward the corner of the room diagonally opposite to that where it had disappeared on the previous night.

"Ah!" cried Irene, with sudden illumination.

She sprang up, and began to move from its place in the corner an old secretary which stood there. The thing was very heavy, but she did not call for help. She strained and tugged, the ghost showing evident signs of perturbation, until she had thrust the secretary aside, and then with her lamp beside her she sat down upon the floor and began to examine the wainscoting.

"Come away, please," the ghost said piteously. "I hate to see you there on the floor. Come and sit by the fire."

"Thank you," she returned. "I am very comfortable where I am."

She felt of the panels, she poked and pried, and for more than an hour she worked, while the ghost stood over her, begging that she go away. It was just as she was on the point of giving up that her fingers, rubbing up and down, started a morsel of dust from a tiny hole in the edge of a panel. She seized a hairpin from amid her locks, and thrust the point into the little opening. The panel started, moved slowly on a concealed hinge, and opened enough for her to insert her fingers and to push it back. A sort of closet lay revealed, and in it was a pile of cases, dusty, moth-eaten, and time-stained. She seized the first that came to hand, and opened it. There upon its bed of faded velvet blazed the "McHugh star," superb in its beauty and a fortune in itself.

"Oh, my diamonds!" shrilled the ghost of Major McHugh. "Oh, what will our circle say!"

"They will have the right to say that you were rude to a lady," Irene answered, with gratuitous severity. "You have wasted your opportunity of being put on record."

"Now I am only a drinking ghost!" the wraith wailed, and faded away upon the air.

Thus it came about that on her wedding-day Irene wore the "McHugh star;" and yet, such is human perversity that she has not only been convinced by her husband that ghosts do not exist, but she has lost completely the power of seeing them, although that singular and valuable gift had come to her, as has been said, by inheritance from a great-aunt on her mother's side of the family.

A PROBLEM IN PORTRAITURE