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“And the little girl? Does she take her meals in the nursery?”

She threw me a startled glance. Was it, I questioned afterward, one of distrust or apprehension?”

“There isn’t any little girl. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard? No. Why, I saw her only yesterday.”

The look she gave me — I was sure of it now — was full of alarm.

“The little girl — she was the sweetest child I ever saw — died just two months ago of pneumonia.”

“But she couldn’t have died.” I was a fool to let this out, but the shock had completely unnerved me.”I tell you I saw her yesterday.”

The alarm in her face deepened.”That is Mrs. Maradick’s trouble. She believes that she still sees her.”

“But don’t you see her?” I drove the question home bluntly.

“No.” She set her lips tightly.”I never see anything.”

So I had been wrong, after all, and the explanation, when it came, only accentuated the terror. The child was dead — she had died of pneumonia two months ago — and yet I had seen her, with my own eyes, playing ball in the library; I had seen her slipping out of her mother’s room, with her doll in her arms.

“Is there another child in the house? Could there be a child belonging to one of the servants?” A gleam had shot through the fog in which I was groping.

“No, there isn’t any other. The doctors tried bringing one once, but it threw the poor lady into such a state she almost died of it. Besides, there wouldn’t be any other child as quiet and sweet-looking as Dorothea. To see her skipping along in her dress of Scotch plaid used to make me think of a fairy, though they say that fairies wear nothing but white or green.”

“Has any one else seen her — the child, I mean — any of the servants?”

“Only old Gabriel, the colored butler, who came with Mrs. Maradick’s mother from South Carolina. I’ve heard that negroes often have a kind of second sight — though I don’t know that that is just what you would call it. But they seem to believe in the supernatural by instinct, and Gabriel is so old and doty — he does no work except answer the door-bell and clean the silver — that nobody pays much attention to anything that he sees — “

“Is the child’s nursery kept as it used to be?”

“Oh, no. The doctor had all the toys sent to the children’s hospital. That was a great grief to Mrs. Maradick; but Doctor Brandon thought, and all the nurses agreed with him, that it was best for her not to be allowed to keep the room as it was when Dorothea was living.”

“Dorothea? Was that the child’s name?”

“Yes, it means the gift of God, doesn’t it? She was named after the mother of Mrs. Maradick’s first husband, Mr. Ballard. He was the grave, quiet kind — not the least like the doctor.”

I wondered if the other dreadful obsession of Mrs. Maradick’s had drifted down through the nurses or the servants to the housekeeper; but she said nothing about it, and since she was, I suspected, a garrulous person, I thought it wiser to assume that the gossip had not reached her.

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough — I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn’t his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician — every nurse will understand what I mean — who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn’t talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life — what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.