“I don’t know yet,” confessed David, knitting his eyebrows in earnest thought as he sat on the grass with his arms about his knees, “but there is bound to be something we can do if we just stand by and try hard enough. And I would try anything for Miss Miranda!” There was nothing small or mean about David’s ambitions nor in the loyalty of his friendship. “While we are talking it all over, there is one other thing I should like to speak about,” began Betsey hesitatingly. “Do you ever think that there is anything about this house—this place that was a house—that is at all—queer?” David sat bolt upright and stared at her fixedly. “You have been talking to Michael,” he accused her. “Michael says that ill luck is brooding over the whole place like a summer thunderstorm and that there is no telling where the bolt will strike. I never saw a person who could believe such strange things as Michael.” “No,” Betsey maintained stoutly, “it is not from anything he said. It is only what I have seen myself.” She sat looking at him, first with sharp penetration, then with the dawn of a sudden discovery. She was possessed of less soaring ambition than David, but of a more keenly observant eye. “You have seen something yourself,” she announced. “You are trying to argue me out of it because you don’t want to believe your own eyes. Tell me what you have seen.” David was silent for a minute, apparently struggling obstinately against his own convictions. “It was just—lights, and—and something moving,” he confessed shamefacedly at last. “It might have been almost anything, wind, fireflies, moonlight on that broken mirror. I’m not going to let Michael make me believe in goblins.” “It is only lately that I have seen it,” Betsey said. “From the house where I live you can see the top of this hill and I am certain that, on three nights at least, I have seen a light moving back and forth among the ruins. It is very small and dim and it goes so slowly, sometimes I think it has disappeared entirely but it always comes in sight again. One night it was raining and the next the moon was shining and the next it was dim starlight, but the light was there. And you have seen it too?” “Yes,” admitted David, “though I have tried to make myself believe it was a mistake. I was coming up Somerset Lane after dark, the first time, and I saw that same light, bobbing and jerking across the broken walls. I stopped and watched and tried to persuade myself that it was fireflies or glow-worms, but I didn’t succeed. A very small light, as you say, and moving slowly but never really coming to rest. I—I don’t quite like it.” It was growing dusky in the shadow of the pines, so that Betsey began to look about her with a slight uneasiness. The subject was one that did not tend greatly toward making one peaceful or at rest in that lonely place. “I rather believe Miss Miranda will be looking for us,” she said somewhat lamely at last. David laughed.