I think the clinching incident which at length united us was the result of one of my yarns to my fellows. For living as I did in the famous haunted house, and having been the companion of smugglers, not to mention the stories I had drunk in from my father's lips, I must have seemed to my mates a very treasure-house of yarns, and my vanity didn't urge me to hide my light under a bushel. It was during one of these yarns that I looked up to find Worthing listening to me. I stopped, feeling guilty somehow of babyish superstition, for my story was one of ghosts, and the scene of it I had laid quite unwarrantably at Sunset Towers. I waited for Worthing to speak, and at last he said, "Of course you know that's all rubbish." I felt wounded in my pride, especially as the story was one of my father's, and the insult seemed to glance off me and strike him; so I answered hotly, "You may sneer, but you wouldn't spend a night alone in our haunted room." "I'll do it to-night," he answered without hesitation. I was taken aback, for first of all our house had no special haunted room that I was aware of, though I knew several rooms where a night alone would be distinctly unpleasant. But chiefly I was alarmed because I knew I had committed myself. Worthing would insist on the ordeal; I knew him well enough for that; and I was frightened at the possible consequences. Whether I believed the old place was haunted or not, I can't rightly say, but the mysterious wailing voices still clung about the air more like a pervading feeling than an articulate sound, though on some nights when the wind was high there seemed to mingle with it a shaken sobbing unspeakably desolate that caught at one's very heart and set it throbbing with an ominous presentiment of impending evil. And lately the crying had taken on such a note of human pain that I had often started awake at night shaken to the soul with pity, and feeling an urgency upon me to rise and search out the suffering thing wherever it might be hid, and soothe it with what consolation the living might bring the dead. And looking at Worthing with the memory of these things in mind I felt a reluctant compunction at submitting him to such a trial. For I knew something of that creeping terror that comes with a strange sighing on the night, and I didn't think he fully realized what he was undertaking. And at this moment it came to me with a shock how dearly I held him, and if possible I would have drawn back. "Not to-night," I said, feeling about for some way of evasion, "To-morrow, if you like." "So that you can prepare a ghost for me?" he said coldly. "No," I cried, "no, on my honour. But--but I must tell my father, and get a bed ready for you, and so on." "To-morrow then," he agreed. Now the next day was Saturday and a holiday, so I said, "Come in the morning and we'll spend the day together. Have a look round the place, and that." "Right," and he turned away.