It was Miss Duck’s birthday—which birthday let us not be ungallant enough to inquire. Georgina herself confessed to thirty-three, but Jabez had heard her confess to quite that amount of years on many previous anniversaries when there had been no company present; he wisely held his tongue, and concluded that Georgina had been adding up with the trifling omission of a ten.

It was quite a festive occasion this evening at the little house at Dalston. Miss Jackson from over the way was invited, and so was her young brother; Bess and George were of the party, and Jabez came home an hour earlier in order to assist Georgina in doing the honours.

Tea was over and cleared away, and in its place there stood upon the table a plate of biscuits, a decanter of port, a decanter of sherry, and a plate of oranges cut into quarters.

Miss Jackson, between sundry fits of weeping, had confided to Bess that birthdays always made her miserable; and Miss Jackson’s brother, supremely uncomfortable in a collar that would keep coming unbuttoned, sat on the edge of a chair and blushed crimson every time anyone looked at him.

Miss Jackson’s brother was a nervous youth of nineteen, who wrote sonnets to Venus and odes to Diana of the most impassioned order, but could not look a mortal female in the face without going the colour of a boiled lobster.

After tea he wriggled on the edge of his ehair, and divided his time between rebuttoning his collar and pretending to be deeply interested in the pattern of the carpet.

‘Georgina dear,’ said Miss Jackson, during a pause in the conversation, ‘how sad it is to think that in the midst of this festivity’—Miss Jackson glanced at the cut oranges and sweet biscuits—‘we are really celebrating the close of another year of your dear life.’

‘Lor, Carry, don’t!’ said Georgina. ‘You give one the creeps.’

‘Alas!’ sighed Carry, ‘we are all one year nearer the grave than we were a year ago.’

Her eyes filled with tears, and she mopped them with her pocket-handkerchief.

‘That’s one way of looking at it, certainly,’ exclaimed Jabez, filling the glasses and handing them round. ‘Have a glass of port?’

‘Thank you,’ said Miss Jackson; and clutching a glass she dropped a tear into it, and tossed it off.

Miss Jackson’s brother also took a glass with a trembling hand, and got it to his lips after spilling half of it down his white waistcoat, and turning the colour of the liquid itself in his agony, ‘Now let’s be jolly,’ exclamed Jabez, shining benignantly on everybody. ‘Here’s Georgina’s jolly good health, and a many of ‘em.’

Bess and George duly honoured the sentiment, and Georgina bowed gracefully to everybody, including Miss Jackson’s brother, who observed the salutation just as he was drinking, and, swallowing his wine in a hurry in order to bow politely, let it all go the wrong way, and choked and coughed for a good five minutes, crowning his misfortunes, in the confusion which seized him in consequence, by wiping his brow with the antimacassar instead of his pocket-handkerchief.

Gradually the little company settled into groups. Miss Jackson, Bess, and Miss Duck plunged into trivialities about Mrs. Jones’s baby next door, Mrs. Brown’s bad husband, the price of provisions, and the state of the weather; Miss Jackson’s brother made a group by himself in a far corner with an album, over which he bent with the earnestness of a student, and looked at the portraits upside down for a quarter of an hour without knowing it; and Jabez and George started a little conversation which we are ungallant enough to imagine will be of more interest to the reader than Miss Jackson’s jeremiads, Bess’s mechanical ‘Yeses’ and ‘Noes,’ or Miss Duck’s choice morsels of local gossip.

‘And so you really like your new place. Well, I’m glad of that,’ said Mr. Duck. ‘Good places ain’t easy found in the City.’

‘Mine’s a capital place, I assure you,’ answered George. ‘There’s really very little to do.’

‘Let’s see, Smith & Co. is the firm, isn’t it? What are they?’ asked Jabez, presently.

‘I don’t know, exactly.’

‘Where are their offices?’

‘Well,’ said George, ‘they have so many.’

‘Many offices! What do you mean?’

‘Why, you see, I’m not attached to any office. One week I go to their office in Fenchurch Street, and perhaps the next I’m at Little Britain. This week I’m on at the office in the Borough.’

‘Do you have many customers come in?’

‘No. Now and then a gentleman comes to see the manager—that’s all.’

‘It’s a queer situation, anyway,’ said Jabez. ‘I wonder what they can be?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered George; ‘but the manager is a most respectable old gentleman, and very kind, and I get my money to the minute.’

Jabez registered a mental note to make some inquiries about the firm of Smith & Co., who had so many offices. And then the conversation turned upon Mr. Jabez’s own line of business.

‘We see some rum affairs in the law,’ he said, after giving George an idea of the grandeur of his firm. ‘We’ve a case now that’s a romance in itself.’

‘A romance!’ exclaimed Miss Jackson. ‘Oh, I dote on romances, they end so sadly. I had my romance once.’

Again the big round eyes filled with tears, and Miss Jackson was about to give way, when Georgina called her a goose, and Jabez went on with his narrative to a larger audience, for the local gossip was exhausted.

‘There is a bit of sadness about this romance, it’s true,’ said Mr. Duck, ‘because there’s a death in it.’ Miss Jackson got her handkerchief ready.

‘It’s the Egerton case I mean. You’ve seen the advertisement in the newspapers asking for proof of Mr. Gurth Egerton’s death? Well, my firm put that in. We’re solicitors to the gent. There’s no doubt he was drowned in the Bon Espoir. But the most curious part of it is the housekeeper, Mrs. Turvey’—Georgina turned up her nose here, and Miss Jackson sighed a sigh of sympathy with her friend’s trouble. ‘The housekeeper, Mrs. Turvey, and her little girl distinctly saw an exact counterpart of Gurth Egerton at his own front door some time after the news of the wreck reached England.’

‘A ghost!’ shrieked Miss Jackson; ‘don’t say it was a ghost.’

‘Well, I don’t know what else it could have been unless it was the drowned man himself; and if it was him, why should he open his front door and go away again? Why shouldn’t he have said, “Mrs. Turvey, light the fire in my bed-room and air my nightshirt.”’

Miss Jackson hid her face, and Georgina exclaimed, ‘Jabez!’ Miss Jackson’s brother buried his head in the album.

‘I beg your pardon, ladies,’ said Mr. Duck, ‘for alluding to details, but in the law we are particular about details. Well, instead of behaving as a live man would, he doesn’t come in, and nothing more is heard of him. His friend, Dr. Birnie, is executor to his will, and inherits a good lump of his property; but Birnie can’t touch a penny till we can prove the death of the man who came to his own front door after he was drowned.’

‘But,’ exclaimed George, ‘surely if he was drowned you can prove it.’

‘Not easily, except by supposition. Some people left the ship before she sank. They all swear the passenger known as Egerton was not in either of the boats. They were all picked up and are accounted for—every soul in the boats.’

‘Then Mr. Egerton must be dead,’ said Miss Georgina.

Mr. Duck smiled.

‘Of course he is, my dear, but not in the eyes of the law.

In a railway accident, or burned in a theatre, or blown up by an explosion of gas, we might have found a button or a coat-tail or something to swear by. You see in the present unsatisfactory state of the case there are people to whom money is left who can’t touch it.’

Miss Georgina shot an arrow.

‘There’s Mrs. Turvey, the housekeeper, has five hundred pounds, for instance.’

‘Yes, my dear, that estimable lady has, or rather will have, five hundred pounds.’

‘I dare pay some old fool will be after her directly that gets known,’ said Miss Georgina, with a look at Miss Jackson.

Jabez protended not to hear, but, turning to George, addressed his conversation specially to him.

It was a stormy evening, and the clouds had been gathering threateningly in the sky, with an indication of more violent tempest yet to come.

Just as Jabez was minutely describing the appearance of the ghost as seen by Mrs. Turvey, a terrific peal of thunder crashed through the stillness of the night, and vivid flashes of lightning played about the room.

With a wild shriek Miss Georgina sprang to her feet.

She was the most abject coward in a thunderstorm.

Miss Jackson endeavoured to calm her.

‘Oh, Carry, let me go—let me go,’ she cried; ‘lead me to the coal-cellar.’

The company endeavoured to soothe her fears. It wasn’t forked lightning, they assured her. There was no danger.

‘Cover the glasses over, Jabez,’ moaned Georgina, ‘and open the windows, and set the doors ajar, and see there are no knives about. Oh!’ Another terrific peal of thunder wrung this last interjection from Miss Duck. She darted out of the room in a state of collapse, and, seizing a chair, rushed into the coal-cellar with it, and there awaited the abatement of the storm.

Jabez explained that his sister was very frightened of lightning, and he hoped the company would excuse her. She always shut herself in the coal-cellar during a thunderstorm.

‘Poor thing!’ sighed Miss Jackson. ‘Spending her birthday in the coal-cellar! Oh, my poor friend!’

Miss Jackson, imagining that a tear ought to be trickling down her nose, was about to produce her handkerchief and wipe it away, when her brother created a diversion which cast the cruel situation of Miss Duck into temporary oblivion.

The windows had been flung open to let a current of air through the room and give the lightning egress, and Miss Jackson’s brother was surveying the heavens and mentally composing an ode to Jupiter, when his attention was attracted by a figure on the opposite side of the road.

Miss Jackson’s brother had been an attentive listener to the ghost story and Jabez’s description of the ghost’s features, and great, therefore, was his honor at beholding, when the lightning lit the figure up, an exact counterpart of the ghost that appeared to Mrs. Turvey.

‘Lo-o-o-k there!’ he stammered. ‘Wh-ha-t’s th-that?’

Jabez followed the direction of the youth’s trembling finger, and then, with a vigorous ‘Well, I’m blest!’ darted into the hall, seized his hat and rushed across the road.

The figure turned and fled.

Jabez pursued it.

Miss Jackson had rushed down-stairs to whisper through the keyhole of the coal-cellar that a ghost had come to wish Georgina many happy returns of the day, and that Jabez was pursuing it.

Georgina came out of the coal-cellar at once.

The ghost might come there.

The storm had abated, and she ventured to join George and Bess and Miss Jackson’s brother at the open window.

The ghost and Jabez were out of sight.

In about five minutes one of them returned panting and out of breath. It was Jabez.

He came into the room looking so white that Miss Jackson screamed.

‘Well, what about the ghost?’ said George, quite bravely, smiling at Bess, upon whom the example of the other ladies seemed likely to have an effect.

‘I’m done,’ answered Jabez, dropping into a chair, and violently polishing his shiny head with his pocket-handkerchief till the gas globes were reflected in it; ‘I’m done. It’s the rummest thing I ever knew.’

‘But you never knew a ghost before, did you?’ asked George, keeping up a smile, meant to be reassuring.

‘Ghost be blowed!’ exclaimed Mr. Jabez, jumping up. ‘It’s no ghost. It’s Gurth Egerton himself.’