This discovery was no shock to me; indeed, I had almost expected it, and
the man had gone just as a figure goes out of a dream, causing no
surprise and leaving me as part and parcel of the same dream without
breaking of continuity. But, as soon as I had paid my bill and thus
resumed in very practical fashion the thread of my normal consciousness,
I turned to the girl and asked her if she knew the old man who had been
sitting in the window seat, and what he had meant by the Wood of the
Dead.
The maiden started visibly, glancing quickly round the empty room, but
answering simply that she had seen no one. I described him in great
detail, and then, as the description grew clearer, she turned a little
pale under her pretty sunborn and said very gravely that it must have
been the ghost.
"Ghost! What ghost?"
"Oh, the village ghost," she said quietly, coming closer to my chair
with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding in a lower
voice, "He comes before a death, they say!"
It was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story she told
me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered with the years
round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure, was an interesting
and peculiar one.
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