As for his right to pry and interfere, that, he assured himself, was a settled thing. Going over in his mind Violet's words and manner in the cemetery, he came to the conclusion that she was half inclined to suspect that he was her sister's destroyer, who had now taken the flat for some vaguely evil reason, perhaps to seek, or to guard from her, those very papers for which she so craved. Had she never heard, he wondered, that her sister's evil mate was a man with a black mustache and pale, dark skin? Perhaps, if she ever had, she would suspect--some one else than he! That would be strange enough, her suspicion of the innocent, if at the same time the guilty was at her side, unsuspected! But David tried to banish from his mind the notion that Van Hupfeldt might possibly be Johann Strauss. At Chelsea he was admitted to a flat as cozily dim as his own, but much more frivolously crowded with knickknacks; nor had he long to wait until Miss L'Estrange, all hair and paint, dashed in. It was near one in the afternoon, but she had an early-morning look of rawness and _déshabillement_, as if she had just risen from bed. Her toilet was incomplete. Her face had the crude look of a water-color daub by a school-girl; her whirl of red hair swept like a turban about her head. "What can I do for you?" she asked. "I am sorry--" began David. "Cut the excuses," said Miss Ermyn L'Estrange. She had a reputation for bruskness which passed for wit in her set. "I am the occupant of the flat in Eddystone Mansions which you recently left." "I hope you like it." "I like it fairly well, as a flat." "What? Not seen anything?" "No. Anything of what nature?" "Anything ghostified?" she snapped, sitting with her chin on her palm, her face poked forward close to David's, while the sleeve fell away from her thin forearm. She had decided that he was an interesting young man. "I have seen no ghost," he said. "I don't believe I ever shall see one." "There are ghosts," she said; "so it's no good saying there are not, for my old Granny Price has been chased by one, and there's been a ghost in that very flat. My servant Jenny saw it with her own eyes." "It is always some one else's eyes which see the invisible," said David. "Jenny's eyes are not some one else's, they are her own. She saw it, I tell you, but perhaps you are one of those people who cower under the sheets all night for fright, and in the daytime swear that there are no ghosts." "What? You know so much of me already?" "Oh, I know my man the moment I lay eyes on him, as a rule. You're from Australia--I can tell your twang--and you have come to England to look for a wife. Can't very well get along without us, after all, can you?" "There is some truth in that. What a pity you didn't see the ghost yourself!" "I heard it; I smelled it." "Really? What did it smell of? Brimstone?" "Violets!"