The Argosy — page 312: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Erna. 295 replace it, I felt almost as though what I had done had exorcised the ghost. I could not tell why, but that first night in Winstanley’s room was the most restless that I spent there. There was a sickening atmosphere of death and decay about the place; and I tossed in my bed restlessly from side to side, and gasped as if the air I breathed would choke me. At last I got up, and dragging one of the heavy antique chairs before the nearer of the two old casements, flung it wide open to the June night, and sat there smoking. The two narcotics—night-air and tobacco—soothed me to sleep at last ; and I woke some hours afterwards with an uncomfortable sense of having already realised my host’s prediction, and of being about to carry down to breakfast a violent cold, and no tidings of the ghost. Erna was in the garden, as her absence from the breakfast-room assured me. As for Mr. Heathcott, I doubt if he had seen the sun rise once in the last ten years, unless from the windows of his bed- room. I stole softly out into the open air, and down the tangled alleys of the dear old garden. I knew the corner that she would seek—where roses grew red and white among the white and yellow of the tangled honeysuckle, and here and there between the bushes bloomed fragrant masses of clove and pink, and the faint air in stealing past drooped heavy with the perfumed breath of flowers. I stole on her softly, and the next moment had caught her in my arms, and my lips for amoment brushed her cheek. She started from me—red as the roses she was gathering. ‘ Mr. Osborne,” she said, ‘‘how dare you!” Then her eyes sought mine with an eager interest as she gently disengaged herself. ‘‘Oh, Gerald,” she cried, “have you seen him ?” “Whore The Winstanley of the legend ?” I questioned, laughing at her. ‘No, Erna; the ghost’s as civil and unobtrusive a ghost as One ‘could desire, and doesn’t seem even inclined to haunt my dreams.” I remember, as if that dead year had been yesterday, how shy she was of me all that day, and how when we parted in the even- ing her hand rather touched mine than clasped it, and she bade me the coldest of “Good-nights.” We met the next morning at the breakfast-table, and I laughed as I caught her eyes fixed on me for a moment with an eager, questioning gaze. ‘No, Erna,” I said, ‘not yet.” ‘* Not yet,” I could have answered also on the third morning of my broken slumbers in that low-browed, shadowy room, where the rats and the wind between them made uncanny noises in the far-off corners, and one started broad awake in the dark hours after mid- night, and looked and listened, with a vague fear lest the dead should also be awake. When one starts broad awake in a room reputed to Conniclooolkks (CO)