She was laughed at,
but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the
girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be
trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little
morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at
times almost beyond her control.
"Oh, dear!" Miss Macroyd whispered. "What is that strange simpleton
going to do, I wonder?"
Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him,
but he, too, wondered and doubted.
The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her
place round to the ghost's in a haste that expressed a fear that it might
escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already
there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They
were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the
ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with
her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more
simply.
She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched,
and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. "Oh, I
don't know how to begin," she said, quite as if she and the phantom were
alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a
sense of its human quality.
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