"_I_ don't see it," said Clayton, with inimitable assurance. "But

it IS so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once

a nail's breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been

killed--he went down into a London basement with a candle to look

for a leakage of gas--and described himself as a senior English

master in a London private school when that release occurred."



"Poor wretch!" said I.



"That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.

There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked

of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever

been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive,

too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood

him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the world,

I think; he had never had a success. He had shirked games and failed

examinations. 'It's like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever

I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.'

Engaged to be married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I

suppose--when the indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs.

'And where are you now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'



"He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was

of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls

too non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue.

_I_ don't know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give

me any clear idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on

the Other Side of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in

with a set of kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men,

who were on a footing of Christian names, and among these there was

certainly a lot of talk about 'going haunting' and things like that.

Yes--going haunting! They seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous

adventure, and most of them funked it all the time. And so primed,

you know, he had come."



"But really!" said Wish to the fire.



"These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly.

"I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that

was the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and

down, with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched

self, and never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last.

He was thinner and sillier and more pointless than if he had been

real and alive. Only then, you know, he would not have been in my

bedroom here--if he HAD been alive. I should have kicked him out."



"Of course," said Evans, "there ARE poor mortals like that."



"And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest

of us," I admitted.



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