She felt of the panels, she poked and pried, and for more than an hour she worked, while the ghost stood over her, begging that she go away. It was just as she was on the point of giving up that her fingers, rubbing up and down, started a morsel of dust from a tiny hole in the edge of a panel. She seized a hairpin from amid her locks, and thrust the point into the little opening. The panel started, moved slowly on a concealed hinge, and opened enough for her to insert her fingers and to push it back. A sort of closet lay revealed, and in it was a pile of cases, dusty, moth-eaten, and time-stained. She seized the first that came to hand, and opened it. There upon its bed of faded velvet blazed the "McHugh star," superb in its beauty and a fortune in itself. "Oh, my diamonds!" shrilled the ghost of Major McHugh. "Oh, what will our circle say!" "They will have the right to say that you were rude to a lady," Irene answered, with gratuitous severity. "You have wasted your opportunity of being put on record." "Now I am only a drinking ghost!" the wraith wailed, and faded away upon the air. Thus it came about that on her wedding-day Irene wore the "McHugh star;" and yet, such is human perversity that she has not only been convinced by her husband that ghosts do not exist, but she has lost completely the power of seeing them, although that singular and valuable gift had come to her, as has been said, by inheritance from a great-aunt on her mother's side of the family. A PROBLEM IN PORTRAITURE I "It does not look like him," Celia Sathman said, moving aside a little that the afternoon light might fall more fully upon a portrait standing unfinished upon the easel; "and yet it is unquestionably the best picture you ever painted. It interests me, it fascinates me; and I never had at all that feeling about Ralph himself. And yet," she added, smiling at her own inconsistency, "it _is_ like him. It is n't what I call a good likeness, and yet--" The artist, Tom Claymore, leaned back in his chair and smiled. "You are right and wrong," he said. "I am a little disappointed that you don't catch the secret of the picture. I knew Ralph would n't understand, but I had hopes of you." A puzzled look came into Celia's face as she continued to study the canvas. Her companion smoked a cigarette, and watched her with a regard which was at once fond and a little amused.