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“My dear,” said the elder woman, “you are trembling like a leaf. What has happened?”

“I have seen him,” answered Mivanway.

“Seen whom?”

“Charles.”

“Charles!” repeated the other, looking at Mivanway as though she thought her mad.

“His spirit, I mean,” explained Mivanway, in an awed voice. “It was standing in the shadow of the rocks, in the exact spot where we first met. It looked older and more careworn; but, oh! Margaret, so sad and reproachful.”

“My dear,” said her sister, leading her in, “you are overwrought. I wish we had never come back to this house.”

“Oh! I was not frightened,” answered Mivanway, “I have been expecting it every evening. I am so glad it came. Perhaps it will come again, and I can ask it to forgive me.”

So next night Mivanway, though much against her sister’s wishes and advice, persisted in her usual walk, and Charles at the same twilight hour started from the inn.

Again Mivanway saw him standing in the shadow of the rocks. Charles had made up his mind that if the thing happened again he would speak, but when the silent figure of Mivanway, clothed in the fading light, stopped and gazed at him, his will failed him.

That it was the spirit of Mivanway standing before him he had not the faintest doubt. One may dismiss other people’s ghosts as the phantasies of a weak brain, but one knows one’s own to be realities, and Charles for the last five years had mingled with a people whose dead dwell about them. Once, drawing his courage around him, he made to speak, but as he did so the figure of Mivanway shrank from him, and only a sigh escaped his lips, and hearing that the figure of Mivanway turned and again passed down the path into the valley, leaving Charles gazing after it.

But the third night both arrived at the trysting spot with determination screwed up to the sticking point.

Charles was the first to speak. As the figure of Mivanway came towards him, with its eyes fixed sadly on him, he moved from the shadow of the rocks, and stood before it.

“Mivanway!” he said.

“Charles!” replied the figure of Mivanway. Both spoke in an awed whisper suitable to the circumstances, and each stood gazing sorrowfully upon the other.

“Are you happy?” asked Mivanway.

The question strikes one as somewhat farcical, but it must be remembered that Mivanway was the daughter of a Gospeller of the old school, and had been brought up to beliefs that were not then out of date.

“As happy as I deserve to be,” was the sad reply, and the answer–the inference was not complimentary to Charles’s deserts–struck a chill to Mivanway’s heart.

“How could I be happy having lost you?” went on the voice of Charles.

Now this speech fell very pleasantly upon Mivanway’s ears. In the first place it relieved her of her despair regarding Charles’s future. No doubt his present suffering was keen, but there was hope for him. Secondly, it was a decidedly “pretty” speech for a ghost, and I am not at all sure that Mivanway was the kind of woman to be averse to a little mild flirtation with the spirit of Charles.

“Can you forgive me?” asked Mivanway.

“Forgive you!” replied Charles, in a tone of awed astonishment. “Can you forgive me? I was a brute–a fool–I was not worthy to love you.”

A most gentlemanly spirit it seemed to be. Mivanway forgot to be afraid of it.

“We were both to blame,” answered Mivanway. But this time there was less submission in her tones. “But I was the most at fault. I was a petulant child. I did not know how deeply I loved you.”

“You loved me!” repeated the voice of Charles, and the voice lingered over the words as though it found them sweet.

“Surely you never doubted it,” answered the voice of Mivanway. “I never ceased to love you. I shall love you always and ever.”