Hezekiah on the roof was safe for a time. Miss Octavia's gentle rejection of my Beacon Street anecdote and her intimation that Hezekiah had been an unbilled participant in the comedy of the ghost had been disquieting, and in my relief at her abandonment of the search I loitered on downstairs with my hostess. I wished to impress her with the idea that I was without urgent business. Hezekiah would, beyond doubt, amuse herself after her own fashion on the roof until I was ready to release her. As I had quietly locked the trunk-room door and carried the key in my pocket I was reasonably sure of this. Humility is best acquired through tribulation, and as Hezekiah sat among the chimney-crocks nursing one stockinged foot and waiting for me to turn up with her lost slipper, it would do her no harm to nibble the bitter fruit of repentance with another biscuit. I should find her much less sure of herself when I saw fit to seek her on the roof. It was a pretty comedy we were playing, but it was best that she should not too complacently take all the curtains. Hezekiah's naughtiness had been diverting up to a point now reached and passed, but the time had arrived for remonstrance, admonition, discipline. And it should be my grateful task to point out the error of her ways and urge her into safer avenues of conduct. Such were my reflections as I attended Miss Octavia in her descent. The memoranda of my adventures at Hopefield Manor fall under two general headings. On the one hand was the ghost and the library chimney; on the other the extraordinary gathering of Cecilia's suitors. As I followed at Miss Octavia's side, she seemed to have dismissed the ghost and the fractious chimney from her mind; her humor changed completely. As in the morning when, unaccountably abandoning her habitual high-flown speech, she had asked me about Cecilia's silver note-book, she seemed troubled; and when we had reached the second floor she paused and lost herself in unwonted preoccupation. "Let us sit here a moment," she said, indicating a long davenport in the broad hall. For the first time her manner betrayed weariness. She laid her hand quietly on my arm and looked at me fixedly. "Arnold," she said,--"you will let me call you Arnold, won't you?" she added plaintively, and never in my life had I been so touched by anything so sweet and gentle and kind,--"Arnold, if an old woman like me should do a very foolish thing in following her own whims and then find that she had probably committed herself to a course likely to cause unhappiness, what would you advise her to do about it?" "Miss Hollister," I answered, "if you trusted Providence this morning to send you a corps of servants when yours had been most unfortunately scattered by ghosts or rumors of ghosts, why will you not continue to have confidence that your affairs will always be directed by agencies equally alert and beneficent?"