When an attractive girl who generally shows remarkable powers of quietude and self-control breaks down, and proves herself a very woman after all, the average man is generally touched, and more than a little moved. Sir Lyon felt oddly affected by Helen's evident distress, and an ardent desire to console and to help her rose instinctively in his mind. "Come into the study!" he exclaimed in a low voice. "And tell me if there's anything I can do to help you?" She obeyed him, and, as he followed her in, he shut the door. She sat down, and for a while he stood before her, gazing sympathetically into her flushed, tear-stained face. "I'm afraid you'll think it so absurd," she said falteringly. "Even I can hardly believe now that what happened _did_ happen!" "Don't tell me--if you'd rather not," he said suddenly; a very disagreeable suspicion entering his mind. Was it within the bounds of possibility that James Tapster had tried to--to kiss her? Sir Lyon had a great prejudice against the poor millionaire, but he instantly rejected the idea. If such a thing had indeed happened to her, Helen Brabazon was the last girl ever to offer to tell anyone, least of all a man. Helen all at once felt that it would be a comfort to confide her strange, terrifying experience to this kind new friend. "I'd rather tell you, I think." She waited a moment, and then came out with a bald statement of what had happened. "I was sitting knitting, when something seemed to force me to look up--and I saw, or I thought I saw, the spirit of a dear, dead friend." Sir Lyon uttered an exclamation of extreme astonishment. "Yes, I know it was only my imagination," Helen went on in a low, troubled voice. "But it gave me a most fearful shock, and I feel that, however long I live, I shall never forget it!" "I wish you would tell me a little more about it," he said persuasively. "I don't ask out of idle curiosity. I was very much impressed by what happened on the first night of our visit here--I mean at the séance." "So was I," she said reluctantly. "But, of course, this had nothing to do with--with anything of that sort. In fact, Bubbles (as she has asked me to call her) was sitting, asleep, I think, in that curious old carved confessional box. My aunt and Mr. Varick were reading--Mr. Varick had just come up from the village with this morning's London papers; Miss Farrow was doing her embroidery, and I'd just been counting some stitches in my knitting, when I looked up and saw--" She stopped, as if not able to go on. "Was what you saw, what you took to be an apparition, close to the confessional?" asked Sir Lyon abruptly. "No, not so very close--still, not very far away. It--she--seemed to be standing behind Mr. Varick, a little to his left, on the door side." "I suppose you would rather not tell me who it was you saw?" Sir Lyon thought he knew, but he wished to feel sure.