But the next night Irene faced the ghost with an expression of contempt
that might have withered the spirit of Hamlet's sire.
"So you think it proper to deceive a lady?" she inquired scornfully. "Is
that the way in which the gentlemen of the 'old school,' of which we
hear so much, behaved?"
"Why, you should reflect," the wraith responded waveringly, "that you
had made me intoxicated." And, indeed, the poor spirit still showed the
effects of its debauch.
"You cannot have been very thoroughly intoxicated," Irene returned, "or
you would not have been able to deceive me."
"But you see," it answered, "that I drank only the ghost of wine, so
that I really had only the ghost of inebriation."
"But being a ghost yourself," was her reply, "that should have been
enough to intoxicate you completely."
"I never argue with a lady," said the ghost loftily, the subject
evidently being too complicated for it to follow further. "At least I
managed to put you as far as possible on the wrong scent."
As it spoke, it gave the least possible turn of its eye toward the
corner of the room diagonally opposite to that where it had disappeared
on the previous night.
"Ah!" cried Irene, with sudden illumination.
She sprang up, and began to move from its place in the corner an old
secretary which stood there. The thing was very heavy, but she did not
call for help. She strained and tugged, the ghost showing evident signs
of perturbation, until she had thrust the secretary aside, and then with
her lamp beside her she sat down upon the floor and began to examine the
wainscoting.
"Come away, please," the ghost said piteously. "I hate to see you there
on the floor. Come and sit by the fire."
"Thank you," she returned. "I am very comfortable where I am."
She felt of the panels, she poked and pried, and for more than an hour
she worked, while the ghost stood over her, begging that she go away. It
was just as she was on the point of giving up that her fingers, rubbing
up and down, started a morsel of dust from a tiny hole in the edge of a
panel. She seized a hairpin from amid her locks, and thrust the point
into the little opening. The panel started, moved slowly on a concealed
hinge, and opened enough for her to insert her fingers and to push it
back. A sort of closet lay revealed, and in it was a pile of cases,
dusty, moth-eaten, and time-stained. She seized the first that came to
hand, and opened it. There upon its bed of faded velvet blazed the
"McHugh star," superb in its beauty and a fortune in itself.
"Oh, my diamonds!" shrilled the ghost of Major McHugh. "Oh, what will
our circle say!"
"They will have the right to say that you were rude to a lady," Irene
answered, with gratuitous severity. "You have wasted your opportunity of
being put on record."
"Now I am only a drinking ghost!" the wraith wailed, and faded away upon
the air.
Thus it came about that on her wedding-day Irene wore the "McHugh star;"
and yet, such is human perversity that she has not only been convinced
by her husband that ghosts do not exist, but she has lost completely the
power of seeing them, although that singular and valuable gift had come
to her, as has been said, by inheritance from a great-aunt on her
mother's side of the family.