"Yes. She helps me. When I get as you might say at cross purposes with Lucy--with Lucy's spirit, that is--Lady Lathkill helps to put it right between us. Then I'm all right, when I know I'm loved." He looked at me stealthily, cunningly. "Then you're all wrong," said I, "surely." "And do you mean to say," put in Lord Lathkill, "that you don't live with the present Mrs. Hale at all? Do you mean to say you never _have_ lived with her?" "I've got a higher claim on me," said the unhappy Colonel. "My God!" said Lord Lathkill. I looked in amazement: the sort of chap who picks up a woman and has a good time with her for a week, then goes home as nice as pie, and now look at him! It was obvious that he had a terror of his black-browed new wife, as well as of Lucy's spirit. A devil and a deep sea with a vengeance! "A damned curious story!" mused Lord Lathkill. "I'm not so sure I like it. Something's wrong somewhere. We shall have to go upstairs." "Wrong!" said I. "Why, Colonel, don't you turn round and quarrel with the spirit of your first wife, fatally and finally, and get rid of her?" The Colonel looked at me, still diminished and afraid, but perking up a bit, as we rose from table. "How would you go about it?" he said. "I'd just face her, wherever she seemed to be, and say: '_Lucy, go to Blazes_!'" Lord Lathkill burst into a loud laugh, then was suddenly silent as the door noiselessly opened, and the dowager's white hair and pointed uncanny eyes peered in, then entered. "I think I left my papers in here, Luke," she murmured. "Yes, mother. There they are. We're just coming up." "Take your time." He held the door, and ducking forward, she went out again, clutching some papers. The Colonel had blenched yellow on his cheek-bones. We went upstairs to the small drawing-room. "You were a long time," said Carlotta, looking in all our faces. "Hope the coffee's not cold. We'll have fresh if it is." She poured out, and Mrs. Hale carried the cups. The dark young woman thrust out her straight, dusky arm, offering me sugar, and gazing at me with her unchanging, yellow-brown eyes. I looked back at her, and being clairvoyant in this house, was conscious of the curves of her erect body, the sparse black hairs there would be on her strong-skinned dusky thighs. She was a woman of thirty, and she had had a great dread, lest she should never marry. Now she was as if mesmerised. "What do you do usually in the evenings?" I said. She turned to me as if startled, as she nearly always did when addressed. "We do nothing," she replied. "Talk; and sometimes Lady Lathkill reads." "What does she read?" "About spiritualism." "Sounds pretty dull."