‘And you said the same thing to me,’ I added, in similar tones. ‘Well, sir—well, Mr Montmorency, I’m very sorry it should have happened so,’ replied the landlord, turning from one to the other, ‘but it’s all my old woman’s fault, for I said to her—’ ‘You did nothing of the sort,’ interrupted his better half; ‘for when I come to you and told you as a second gentleman wanted rooms here, it was you as said, “Let him have the little room upstairs, and no one will be ever the wiser if he takes his meals out of a day.”’ ‘But we never thought—begging your pardon, Mr Montmorency—as you’d take such a liberty with the upper offices as to make noises in them as should disturb the whole house.’ ‘Well, what was I to do?’ replied the young man, appealing to me. ‘They’ve given me three leading parts to get up at a fortnight’s notice, and if I don’t study them at night I have no chance of being ready in time.’ ‘In fact,’ I said, oracularly, ‘you’ve been cheating each other all round. Mr Bizzey has cheated his employers by letting apartments to which he has no right; you have cheated the Bizzeys by using one which you never hired of them; and I have—’ ‘cheated myself,’ I might have added, but I stopped short and looked wise instead. ‘And it was never no ghosts after all!’ said Mrs Bizzey, in accents of disappointment, as her husband marched her downstairs. * * * * * There is nothing more to tell. I reconciled Mr Julian Cockleboat to his guardian and his destiny; and I wrote ‘The Origin of Dreams,’ the best part, by the way (as all the critics affirmed), of ‘The Cyclopædia of the Brain.’ I made more money by my little trip than six months of ordinary labour would have brought me; and Lord Seaborne speaks of me to this day, amongst his acquaintances, as the ‘very cleverest amateur detective he has ever known.’ And so I am. THE END. [Illustration] THE GHOST OF CHARLOTTE CRAY. Mr Sigismund Braggett was sitting in the little room he called his study, wrapped in a profound—not to say a mournful—reverie. Now, there was nothing in the present life nor surroundings of Mr Braggett to account for such a demonstration. He was a publisher and bookseller; a man well to do, with a thriving business in the city, and the prettiest of all pretty villas at Streatham. And he was only just turned forty; had not a grey hair in his head nor a false tooth in his mouth; and had been married but three short months to one of the fairest and most affectionate specimens of English womanhood that ever transformed a bachelor’s quarters into Paradise.