“Is it at midnight--in the gloaming--in the chill, mysterious dawn? You won’t answer! Shall I guess? If you are like me, it is in broad daylight--between two and three in the afternoon--when the servants are all idling after their dinner, and the house is silent. You are alone in a big, bright room, perhaps, with another room opening out of it, and a door a long way off. You sit writing at your table, and you feel all at once that the room is haunted--there must be something or some one stealing in at that remotest door. You daren’t look round. You go to the window and look out into garden or street--for a town house may be just as ghastly as a country one--and then with a great effort you turn slowly round and face your terror, in the broad, garish sunlight, in the business hours of the day. There is nothing there, of course; but the feeling has not been the less vivid. I know I shall be spectre-haunted at the Mount. You must all come and scare away the shadows. Mr. Colfox, are you fond of billiards?” “I own to a liking for the game. I play with Mr. Crowther and his youngest daughter whenever I dine at Glenaveril. Alicia is a very fine player, for a girl, and her father plays a good game.” “Then you will come up to the Mount two or three times a week and play with me, I hope. There’s a decent table--cushions as hard as bricks, I dare say, but we must make the best of it--and there’s plenty of sound claret in the cellars to say nothing of a keg or two of Schiedam that I sent home from the Hague.” “Mr. Colfox will not make much impression either on your claret or your schnapps,” said Disney, laughing. “He is almost as temperate as one of those terrible anchorites in the novel we were reading the other day--’Homo Sum.’” “I am glad you put in the qualifying ‘almost,’” said the curate, “for I hope to taste Captain Hulbert’s Schiedam.” The captain expatiated upon what his three new friends--and his one old friend, Martin Disney--were to do to cheer him in his solitude at the Mount. “There is nothing of the anchorite about me,” he said. “I love society, I love life and movement, I love bright faces.” He would not leave until they had all promised to take tea on board the yacht on the following afternoon, an engagement which was kept by Allegra and the colonel; but not by Isola, whose headache was worse after the little dinner-party; nor by the curate, who had parish business to detain him on shore. CHAPTER XIII. “UNDER THE PINE-WOOD, BLIND WITH BOUGHS.” If Isola had any disinclination to visit Captain Hulbert’s yacht, her headache only served to defer the evil day, for after that first tea-drinking came other invitations and other arrangements, fishing-parties, luncheons off Mevagissey, entertainments in which Isola must needs share when she saw her husband and his sister bent upon the enjoyment of the hour, delighted with the _Vendetta_ and her warm-hearted skipper.