“Why, what’s the matter? I assure you, you don’t disturb me!” the white figure twittered; adding, with a faint laugh: “I don’t have so many visitors nowadays—” She had reached the hall, and stood before me, lifting her candle shakily and peering up into my face. “You haven’t changed—not as much as I should have thought. But _I_ have, haven’t I?” she appealed to me with another laugh; and abruptly she laid her hand on my arm. I looked down at the hand, and thought to myself: “_That_ can’t deceive me.” I have always been a noticer of hands. The key to character that other people seek in the eyes, the mouth, the modelling of the skull, I find in the curve of the nails, the cut of the finger-tips, the way the palm, rosy or sallow, smooth or seamed, swells up from its base. I remembered Mary Pask’s hand vividly because it was so like a caricature of herself; round, puffy, pink, yet prematurely old and useless. And there, unmistakably, it lay on my sleeve: but changed and shrivelled—somehow like one of those pale freckled toadstools that the least touch resolves to dust.... Well—to dust? Of course.... I looked at the soft wrinkled fingers, with their foolish little oval finger-tips that used to be so innocently and naturally pink, and now were blue under the yellowing nails—and my flesh rose in ridges of fear. “Come in, come in,” she fluted, cocking her white untidy head on one side and rolling her bulging blue eyes at me. The horrible thing was that she still practised the same arts, all the childish wiles of a clumsy capering coquetry. I felt her pull on my sleeve and it drew me in her wake like a steel cable. The room she led me into was—well, “unchanged” is the term generally used in such cases. For as a rule, after people die, things are tidied up, furniture is sold, remembrances are despatched to the family. But some morbid piety (or Grace’s instructions, perhaps) had kept this room looking exactly as I supposed it had in Miss Pask’s lifetime. I wasn’t in the mood for noting details; but in the faint dabble of moving candle-light I was half aware of bedraggled cushions, odds and ends of copper pots, and a jar holding a faded branch of some late-flowering shrub. A real Mary Pask “interior”! The white figure flitted spectrally to the chimney-piece, lit two more candles, and set down the third on a table. I hadn’t supposed I was superstitious—but those three candles! Hardly knowing what I did, I hurriedly bent and blew one out. Her laugh sounded behind me. “Three candles—you still mind that sort of thing? I’ve got beyond all that, you know,” she chuckled. “Such a comfort ... such a sense of freedom....” A fresh shiver joined the others already coursing over me. “Come and sit down by me,” she entreated, sinking to a sofa. “It’s such an age since I’ve seen a living being!”