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I can give you no idea how thrilling it was to listen to this unhappy man, who seemed so pitifully cowed and broken, so helpless and hopeless. Whether there had been any thing supernatural, or whether it was merely the workings of a diseased brain, it was horribly real to him; and his life had been spoiled.

“Whiston, my dear fellow,” said my brother, “I’m not going to believe in ghosts if I can possibly help it. Could you be perfectly sure that you did not see Dunster himself at first? You know he was counted among the missing only, there is no positive proof that he died, though I admit there was only a chance he was not killed outright. We never saw him buried,” said Jack, with unsympathetic persistence. “I’m sorry for you; but you mustn’t give way to this thing. You have thought about it until you can’t forget it at all. Such cases are not uncommon: it’s simply a hallucination. I’ll give you proofs enough tomorrow. Have some more claret, won’t you?” Jack spoke eagerly, with the kindest tone; and his guest could not help responding by a faint, dreary little smile. “Do you like music as much as ever? Suppose we go over into the parlor, and my sister will play for us; won’t you, Helen?” which was asking a great deal of me just then.

And we apparently forgot all about Mr. Dunster for the rest of the evening. And, when Jack asked Mr. Whiston if he remembered a song he used to sing in college, to my delight he went at once to the piano, and sang it with a very pleasant tenor voice; and when he ended, and my brother applauded, he struck some new chords, and began to sing a little Florentine street-song, which was always a great favorite of mine. It is a sweet, piteous little song; and it bewitched me then as much as it did the very first time I had heard some boys sing it, as they went under our windows at night, when I was first in Florence years ago.

He said no more about the ghost; but later that night, when I happened to wake, I wondered if the poor man was keeping his anxious watch, and listening in a strange house to hear the hours struck one by one. He went away soon after breakfast; and, though he promised to come in again to say good-by, that was the last we saw of him, and we did not see his name on the steamer list either, so we were much puzzled, and we talked about him a great deal, and told George Sheffield the story, which he wished he had heard himself.

“Of course it is a hallucination,” said Jack: “they are by no means uncommon. I can read you accounts of any number of such cases. There is a good deal about them in Griesinger’s book,–the chapter called ‘Elementary Disorders in Mental Disease,’ Helen, if you care to look at it, or any of those books on insanity. Didn’t you have Dr. Elam’s ‘A Physician’s Problems’ a while ago? He has an essay there which is very good.”

“I was reading his essay on ‘Moral and Criminal Epidemics,'” said I, “that was all. It’s a cheerful thing too!”

“Isn’t there such a thing as these visions coming before slight attacks of epilepsy?” said George. And my brother said yes; but Mr. Whiston had nothing of that kind, he had taken pains to find out. There was no hope of a cure, he feared; he was not wise in such cases. But the trouble had gone too far, there were bad symptoms, and he confesses he has hurt himself with opium during the last year or two. “He will not live long at any rate,” said Jack; “and I think the sooner the end comes the better. He has a predisposition to mental disease, and he was always a frail, curious make-up. But I don’t know–‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ George Sheffield; and I wish you had heard him tell his story.”