CHAPTER XXII.
A TALK ABOUT GHOSTS.
But again he was the first.
They had turned and gone a good way down the long garden, and had again turned towards the house.
"This place makes me feel as I never felt before," he said.

"There is such a wonderful sense of vanished life about it.

The whole garden seems dreaming about things of long ago--when troops of ladies, now banished into pictures, wandered about the place, each full of her own thoughts and fancies of life, each looking at everything with ways of thinking as old-fashioned as her garments.

I could not be here after nightfall without feeling as if every walk were answering to unseen feet, as if every tree might be hiding some lovely form, returned to dream over old memories." "Where is the good of fancying what is not true?
I can't care for what I know to be nonsense!" She was glad to find a spot where she could put down the foot of contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the neighbours called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt upon everything characterized as superstition: she had now something to say for herself! "How do you know it is nonsense ?" asked Donald, looking round in her face with a bright smile.
"Not nonsense to keep imagining what nobody can see ?" "I can only imagine what I do not see." "Nobody ever saw such creatures as you suppose in any garden! Then why fancy the dead so uncomfortable, or so ill looked after, that they come back to plague us!" "Plainly they have never plagued you much!" rejoined Donal laughing.
"But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of night ?" "Never once," answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of indignation.
"I never was so absurd!" "Then there may be a whole night-world that you know nothing about.

You cannot tell that the place is not then thronged with ghosts: you have never given them a chance of appearing to you.