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When Charley got back to his luxurious apartment he was possessed with a superstitious feeling. He took up the paper weight that Henry Vail had held in his hand the very last night he was in this parlor, and he thought the whole conversation over as he smoked his cigar, fearing to put out his light.

“Confound the man that invented ghost stories for a Christmas amusement!” he said, as he remembered Old Scrooge and Tiny Tim. “Well, I’m not Old Scrooge, anyhow, if I’m not as good as poor Henry Vail.”

I do not know whether it was the reaction from the punch he had drunk, or the sudden shock of Vail’s death, or the troubled conscience, or from all three, but when he got into bed he found himself shaking with nervousness.

He had been asleep an hour, perhaps, when he heard a genuine Irish voice say, “Faix, mister, and is yer name Charley?”

He started up–looked around the room. He had made so much concession to his nervous feeling that he had not turned the gas quite out, as was his custom. The dim duskiness made him shudder; he expected to see the Huckleberry Street Irish woman looking at him. But he shook off his terror a little, uttered another malediction on the man that invented Christmas ghost stories, concluded that his illusion must have come from his lying on his left side, turned over, and reflected that by so doing he would relieve his heart and stomach from the weight of his liver, repeated this physiological reflection in a soothing way two or three times, dropped off into a quiet snooze, and almost immediately found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking with a chill terror, sure that the Irish voice had again asked the question, “Faix, mister, and is yer name Charley?” He had a feeling, though his back was toward the table, that some one sat at the table. Charley was no coward, but it took him a minute or two to shake off his terror and regain enough self-control to look around.

For a moment he saw, or thought he saw, a form sitting at the table, then it disappeared, and then, after a good while, Charley got himself composed to sleep again, this time with his head well bolstered, to reduce the circulation in the brain, as he reflected.

He did not get to sleep, however, for before he became unconscious the Irish voice from just above the carved headboard spoke out so clear now that there could be no mistake, “Faix, mister, and is yer name Charley?” It was then that he rose in bed and uttered the exclamation which I set down in the first line of this story. Charley Vanderhuyn could not tell whether he meant Charles Dickens or Nick. Perhaps you can. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to matter much, after all.

III.

A narrative of this sort, like a French sermon, divides itself into three parts. I have now got through the preliminary tanglements of the history of the founding of the Christmas Club, and I hope to be able to tell the remainder of the story with as few digressions as possible, for at Christmastide a body doesn’t want his stories to stretch out to eternity, even if they are ghostly.

Charley Vanderhuyn said “The Dickens!” and though his meaning was indefinite, he really meant it, whatever it might be. He looked up at the ornamental figure carved on the rich headboard of his bed as if he suspected that the headboard of English walnut had spoken in Irish. He looked at the headboard intently a long time, partly because the Irish voice had come from that direction, and partly because he was afraid to look round toward the table. He knew, just as well before he looked around as he did afterward, what he should see. He saw it before he looked round by some other vision than that of his eyes, and that was what made him shiver so. He knew that the persistent gray eyes were upon him, that they would never move until he looked round. He could feel the look before he saw it.