slowly arose. When she and the girls had gone and the men were reseated Loftus turned to Orr.
“Did the spook say anything else?”
Orr was selecting a cigar from a cabinet on wheels which a servant trundled about. He chose and lighted one before he replied. Then he looked at Loftus.
“Yes, she told me that she saw—” Orr paused. The cigar had gone out. He lighted it again. “She told me that she saw death hereabouts.”
Loftus was also lighting a cigar. “Then I too am a spook,” he replied. “I foretold that you would say something ghastly.”
“But, my dear fellow,” Orr rejoined, “truth is always that. People fancy that it is made of lace and pearls like a girl on her wedding day. It is not that at all. It is just what you call it. It is ghastly. Read history. Any reliable work is but a succession of groans. The more reliable it is the more groans there will be.”
Annandale, who had been helping himself to brandy, interrupted. “Talking of reading things, I saw somewhere that after some dinner or other, when the women had gone, a chap began on a rather—well, don’t you know, a sort of barnyard story and the host, who could not quite stomach it, said: ‘Suppose we continue the conversation in the drawing-room?’ So, Royal, what do you say? If Orr is going to shock us, suppose we do.”
Loftus with a painted fingertip flipped the ashes from his cigar.
“I fear that I have lost the ability to be shocked, but not the ability to be bored.”
Yet presently, after another cigar and conscious perhaps that Fanny Price, though often exasperating, never bored, he returned with his guests to