WANDERING GHOSTS [Illustration: Logo] THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO [Illustration: "What?... It's gone, man, the skull is gone!!"] WANDERING GHOSTS BY F. MARION CRAWFORD AUTHOR OF "SARACINESCA," "A ROMAN SINGER," ETC. _WITH FRONTISPIECE_ New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1911 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY STREET AND SMITH. COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY F. MARION CRAWFORD AND BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. COPYRIGHT, 1905 AND 1908, BY P. F. COLLIER AND SON. COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1911. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. CONTENTS PAGE THE DEAD SMILE 1 THE SCREAMING SKULL 41 MAN OVERBOARD! 97 FOR THE BLOOD IS THE LIFE 165 THE UPPER BERTH 195 BY THE WATER OF PARADISE 235 THE DOLL'S GHOST 279 THE DEAD SMILE CHAPTER I Sir Hugh Ockram smiled as he sat by the open window of his study, in the late August afternoon; and just then a curiously yellow cloud obscured the low sun, and the clear summer light turned lurid, as if it had been suddenly poisoned and polluted by the foul vapours of a plague. Sir Hugh's face seemed, at best, to be made of fine parchment drawn skin-tight over a wooden mask, in which two eyes were sunk out of sight, and peered from far within through crevices under the slanting, wrinkled lids, alive and watchful like two toads in their holes, side by side and exactly alike. But as the light changed, then a little yellow glare flashed in each. Nurse Macdonald said once that when Sir Hugh smiled he saw the faces of two women in hell--two dead women he had betrayed. (Nurse Macdonald was a hundred years old.) And the smile widened, stretching the pale lips across the discoloured teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt for the human doll. The hideous disease of which he was dying had touched his brain. His son stood beside him, tall, white and delicate as an angel in a primitive picture; and though there was deep distress in his violet eyes as he looked at his father's face, he felt the shadow of that sickening smile stealing across his own lips and parting them and drawing them against his will. And it was like a bad dream, for he tried not to smile and smiled the more. Beside him, strangely like him in her wan, angelic beauty, with the same shadowy golden hair, the same sad violet eyes, the same luminously pale face, Evelyn Warburton rested one hand upon his arm. And as she looked into her uncle's eyes, and could not turn her own away, she knew that the deathly smile was hovering on her own red lips, drawing them tightly