Everybody dies, don't they?

Everybody come back.

Isn't that so?

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

How do the dead come back, mother?

What's the secret? The Little Ghost by Hugh Walpole.

One.

Ghosts.

I looked across the table at Truscott and had a sudden desire to impress him.

Truscott has, before now, invited confidences in just that same way with his flat impassivity,

his air of not caring whether you say anything to him or no,

he is determined indifference to your drama and your pathos.

On this particular evening he had been less impassive.

He had himself turned the conversation towards spiritualism, seances and all that world

of humbug as he believed it to be. And suddenly I saw, or fancied I saw, a real invitation

in his eyes. Something that made me say to myself, well, hang it all. I've known Truscott for nearly

20 years. I've never shown him the least bit of my real self. He thinks me a writing money machine, with no thought in the world beside my brazen cereal stories and the yacht I purchased out of them. So I told him this story, and I will do him the justice to say that he listened to every word of it most attentively, although it was far into the evening before I had finished.

He didn't seem impatient with all the little details that I gave. Of course, in a ghost story, details are more important than anything else.

But was it a ghost story? Was it a story at all? Was it true,

even in its material background? Now, as I tried to tell it again, I can't be sure. Truscott

is the only other person who's ever heard it, and at the end of it he made no comment whatever.

It happened long ago, long before the war, when I had been married for about five years and was an exceedingly prosperous journalist with a nice little house and two children in Wimbledon.

...