I nodded in assent; I could scarcely have spoken. My heart was beginning to thump. Father would not have commended my nerves had he known it. "Something odd and inexplicable happened last night," he went on. "Nugent and I were sitting in the gallery. It was a mild night, and the moon magnificent. We thought the gallery would be pleasanter than the smoking-room, now that Phil and his pipes are away. Well--we were sitting quietly. I had lighted my reading-lamp on the little table at one end of the room, and Nugent was half lying in his chair, doing nothing in particular except admiring the night, when all at once he started violently with an exclamation, and, jumping up, came towards me. Leila, his teeth were chattering, and he was _blue_ with cold. I was very much alarmed--you know how ill he was at college. But in a moment or two he recovered. "'What on earth is the matter?' I said to him. He tried to laugh. "'I really don't know,' he said; 'I felt as if I had had an electric shock of _cold_--but I'm all right again now.' "I went into the dining-room, and made him take a little brandy and water, and sent him off to bed. Then I came back, still feeling rather uneasy about him, and sat down with my book, when, Leila--you will scarcely credit it--I myself felt the same shock exactly. A perfectly _hideous_ thrill of cold. That was how it began. I started up, and then, Leila, by degrees, in some instinctive way, I seemed to realise what had caused it. My dear child, you will think I have gone crazy when I tell you that there was a shadow--a shadow in the moonlight--_chasing_ me, so to say, round the room, and once again it caught me up, and again came that appalling sensation. I would not give in. I dodged it after that, and set myself to watch it, and then----" I need not quote my father further; suffice to say his experience matched that of the rest of us entirely--no, I think it surpassed them. It was the worst of all. Poor father! I shuddered for him. I think a shock of that kind is harder upon a man than upon a woman. Our sex is less sceptical, less entrenched in sturdy matters of fact, more imaginative, or whatever you like to call the readiness to believe what we cannot explain. And it was astounding to me to see how my father at once capitulated--never even _alluding_ to a possibility of trickery. Astounding, yet at the same time not without a certain satisfaction in it. It was almost a relief to find others in the same boat with ourselves. I told him at once all _we_ had to tell, and how painfully exercised we had been as to the advisability of keeping our secret to ourselves. I never saw father so impressed; he was awfully kind, too, and so sorry for us. He made me fetch Miss Larpent, and we held a council of--I don't know what to call it!--not "war," assuredly, for none of us thought of fighting the ghost. How could one fight a shadow?