“There M. R. F. ceases to be amusing, because my intentions are opposed to touching the lady.”

“Do you know her?”

“Not in the least.”

“Hadn’t you better see her?”

“My dear Mortimer, you have studied my character. Could I possibly go down there, labelled ‘ELIGIBLE. ON VIEW,’ and meet the lady, similarly labelled? Anything to carry out M. R. F.’s arrangements, I am sure, with the greatest pleasure — except matrimony. Could I possibly support it? I, so soon bored, so constantly, so fatally?”

“But you are not a consistent fellow, Eugene.”

“In susceptibility to boredom,” returned that worthy, “I assure you I am the most consistent of mankind.”

“Why, it was but now that you were dwelling in the advantages of a monotony of two.”

“In a lighthouse. Do me the justice to remember the condition. In a lighthouse.”

Mortimer laughed again, and Eugene, having laughed too for the first time, as if he found himself on reflection rather entertaining, relapsed into his usual gloom, and drowsily said, as he enjoyed his cigar, “No, there is no help for it; one of the prophetic deliveries of M. R. F. must for ever remain unfulfilled. With every disposition to oblige him, he must submit to a failure.”

It had grown darker as they talked, and the wind was sawing and the sawdust was whirling outside paler windows. The underlying churchyard was already settling into deep dim shade, and the shade was creeping up to the housetops among which they sat. “As if,” said Eugene, “as if the churchyard ghosts were rising.”

He had walked to the window with his cigar in his mouth, to exalt its flavour by comparing the fireside with the outside, when he stopped midway on his return to his arm-chair, and said:

“Apparently one of the ghosts has lost its way, and dropped in to be directed. Look at this phantom!”

Lightwood, whose back was towards the door, turned his head, and there, in the darkness of the entry, stood a something in the likeness of a man: to whom he addressed the not irrelevant inquiry, “Who the devil are you?”

“I ask your pardons, Governors,” replied the ghost, in a hoarse double-barrelled whisper, “but might either on you be Lawyer Lightwood?”

“What do you mean by not knocking at the door?” demanded Mortimer.

“I ask your pardons, Governors,” replied the ghost, as before, “but probable you was not aware your door stood open.”

“What do you want?”

Hereunto the ghost again hoarsely replied, in its double-barrelled manner, “I ask your pardons, Governors, but might one on you be Lawyer Lightwood?”

“One of us is,” said the owner of that name.

“All right, Governors Both,” returned the ghost, carefully closing the room door; “’tickler business.”