The girl looked straight at him, but only for a few seconds; she then turned towards O'Hara, and seemed to concentrate her whole attention upon him. There was now, Menzies thought, a certain indistinctness and a something shadowy about her that he had not at first noticed, and he was thinking how he could test her to see if she were really a substance or merely an optical illusion, when O'Hara, who was getting tired at his long absence, called out, whereupon the girl at once vanished, uttering, as she melted away in the background, in the same inexplicable manner as the old woman had done, such an awful, harrowing, wailing shriek, that it seemed to fill the whole air, and to linger on for an eternity. Thoroughly terrified, Menzies, as soon as his scattered senses could collect themselves, fled from the spot, and didn't cease running till O'Hara's angry shout brought him to a standstill. To his astonishment O'Hara hadn't heard anything, and was only annoyed at his seemingly mad behaviour. In answer to his description of the girl, however, and the wailing, O'Hara at once declared it was the Banshee, and the one he had always been so particularly anxious to see. "Unless you are having a joke at my expense," he said, "and you look too genuinely scared for that, you have actually seen her--a very beautiful girl, dressed after some old-time Irish custom, in a loose flowing green mantle--only of course you couldn't see the colour--with head and feet bare. But it's odd about that wail. The good Banshee in a family is always supposed to make it, but why didn't I hear her? Why should it only be you? You're Scotch, not Irish." "For which I'm truly thankful," Menzies said with warmth. "I've lived without ever seeing or hearing a ghost or anything approaching one for thirty-eight years, and now I've seen and heard two, within the short space of three weeks, and all because of you, because you're Irish. No thanks. None of your Banshees for me. I'd rather, ten thousand times rather, be just an ordinary laddie from the Highlands, and dispense with your highly aristocratic and fastidious family ghost." "Come, now," O'Hara said good-humouredly, "we won't quarrel about so unsubstantial a thing as the Banshee. Let's hurry up and have a bottle of cognac to make us think of something rather more cheerful." Menzies often thought of those words, for it is not infrequently the most trifling words and actions that haunt our memory to the greatest extent in after days. The rest of the evening passed quite uneventfully, and, after they had "toasted" each other, the two friends separated for the night. Two days later O'Hara's body lay in the Morque, whither it had been taken from the Seine. Though there were some doubts expressed as to the exact manner in which he had met his death, it was officially recorded "death from misadventure," and it was not till several years later Menzies learned the truth.