"Lying on one's face and hands. What becomes of the rest of one? Does one keep one's heels in the air whilst doing it? To me it sounds awful! Yet only last week I read in the papers of a fellow who was found on a road on his face and hands, and the doctors said he must have been in that position _for hours!_ Fancy--_your_ nose, for instance, Rossmoyne, in the mud, and your heels in the air, _for hours_!" Lord Rossmoyne, having vainly tried to imagine his dignified body in such a position, looks distinctly offended. "No, _nobody_ would like it," says Kelly, pathetically, answering his disgusted look exactly as if it had been put into words. "There is a shameful frivolity about it not to be countenanced for a moment. Yet good and wise men have been said to do it. Fancy the Archbishop of Canterbury, now, balancing himself on his nose and his palms! Oh! it _can't_ be true!" His voice by this time is positively piteous, and he looks earnestly around, as though longing for some one to support his disbelief. "You are really excelling yourself to-night," says Mrs. Herrick, in a delicately disdainful tone. "Am I? I am glad," humbly, "that _you_ have had an opportunity of seeing me at my poor best." "I wonder," says Desmond, suddenly, "if, when old O'Connor revisits the earth at the witching hour, he comes in the attitude so graphically described by Kelly? In acrobat fashion, I mean." At this Monica breaks into laughter so merry, so full of utterly childish _abandon_ and enjoyment, that all the others perforce join in it. "Oh! fancy a ghost standing on his head!" she says, when she can speak. "I shouldn't fancy it at all," says Mr. Kelly, gloomily. "I _won't_. Far from it. And I should advise you, Miss Beresford, to treat with less frivolity a subject so fraught with terror,--especially at this time of night. If that 'grand old man' were to appear now," with a shuddering glance behind him, "what _would_ become of us all?" "An unpleasant idea!" says Miss Browne,--"so unpleasant, indeed, that I think I should like to go for a little walk somewhere,--_any_where, away from the scene of the late Mr. O'Connor's nightly visitations." "Come to the end of the shrubbery, then," says Desmond, "and look at the sea. It should be worth the trouble on such a night as this. Come you too, Olga." "I should like it, but my head aches so," says Mrs. Bohun, plaintively. And, indeed, she is very pale. "It is either the moonlight which oppresses me, or--I don't know what. No! I shall go indoors, I think." "Then I shall go with you," says Mrs. Herrick, regarding her with a certain anxiety. "But you," turning to Mary Browne, "must not miss a glimpse of the coast by moonlight. Mr. Kelly will show it to you."