By seven o’clock I was worn out—not from work but from the strain on my sympathy—and I was glad, indeed, when one of the maids came in to bring me an early cup of coffee. Mrs. Maradick was still sleeping—it was a mixture of bromide and chloral I had given her—and she did not wake until Miss Peterson came on duty an hour or two later. Then, when I went downstairs, I found the dining-room deserted except for the old housekeeper, who was looking over the silver. Doctor Maradick, she explained to me presently, had his breakfast served in the morning-room on the other side of the house. “And the little girl? Does she take her meals in the nursery?” She threw me a startled glance. Was it, I questioned afterwards, one of distrust or apprehension? “There isn’t any little girl. Haven’t you heard?” “Heard? No. Why, I saw her only yesterday.” The look she gave me—I was sure of it now—was full of alarm. “The little girl—she was the sweetest child I ever saw—died just two months ago of pneumonia.” “But she couldn’t have died.” I was a fool to let this out, but the shock had completely unnerved me. “I tell you I saw her yesterday.” The alarm in her face deepened. “That is Mrs. Maradick’s trouble. She believes that she still sees her.” “But don’t you see her?” I drove the question home bluntly. “No.” She set her lips tightly. “I never see anything.” So I had been wrong, after all, and the explanation, when it came, only accentuated the terror. The child was dead—she had died of pneumonia two months ago—and yet I had seen her, with my own eyes, playing ball in the library; I had seen her slipping out of her mother’s room, with her doll in her arms. “Is there another child in the house? Could there be a child belonging to one of the servants?” A gleam had shot through the fog in which I was groping. “No, there isn’t any other. The doctors tried bringing one once, but it threw the poor lady into such a state she almost died of it. Besides, there wouldn’t be any other child as quiet and sweet-looking as Dorothea. To see her skipping along in her dress of Scotch plaid used to make me think of a fairy, though they say that fairies wear nothing but white or green.” “Has any one else seen her—the child, I mean—any of the servants?” “Only old Gabriel, the coloured butler, who came with Mrs. Maradick’s mother from South Carolina. I’ve heard that negroes often have a kind of second sight—though I don’t know that that is just what you would call it. But they seem to believe in the supernatural by instinct, and Gabriel is so old and dotty—he does no work except answer the door-bell and clean the silver—that nobody pays much attention to anything that he sees—” “Is the child’s nursery kept as it used to be?”