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might succeed in shutting the door and getting away. But exactly as I was nerving myself to move, and to move quietly, Agnes turned and looked at me.
    ‘I know it’s no longer our house, my sister’s and mine,’ she said, ‘but still you are our guest, Mr. Oxenhope, even if only in a sense.’
    ‘I apologise,’ I said. ‘I had no idea the room was not empty. I have been seeing Mr. Blantyre today. Unfortunately, he’s not very well, and there are one or two things I thought I should check on his behalf, before the house opens to the public.’
    ‘Of course it is what we expect and have become accustomed to. I am not complaining. What else would you like to see? The key of your room doesn’t open every door.’
    ‘I don’t think any of the other little items will involve keys,’ I replied, ‘though thank you very much. As for this room, I only wanted to make sure it was empty, because we should like to store a few things in it.’
    ‘There are other empty rooms in the house,’ said Agnes, ‘and I am sure we can spare this one.’
    ‘All the same, I do apologise again for not speaking to you first. It was simply that I had a little time on my hands, as today I haven’t visited the river.’
    ‘It is no longer our house,’ said Agnes, ‘so that, strictly speaking, there is no obligation on you to ask us about anything. Has Mr. Blantyre any criticisms of my housekeeping?’
    ‘None,’ I assured her. ‘We agreed that it is one of the best maintained of all the Fund’s many properties.’
    And, interestingly enough, the dust had by then ceased to swirl, though I am sure it still lay thick on the room floor, the floors of the other rooms, the passages, the stairs, the furniture , and all our hearts.

THE HOUSES OF THE RUSSIANS
     
     

     

One day, when the Blessed Seraphim was a child, his mother took him to the top of a bell-tower which was under construction. The child slipped and fell a hundred and fifty feet to the cobblestones below. His distracted mother rushed down expecting to see his mangled body, but, to her astonishment and joy, he was standing up apparently unhurt. Later in life he was several times in mortal danger and each time was saved by a miracle.
    PRINCE FELIX YOUSSOUPOFF
     
    ‘May I buy you a drink, sir?’ Dyson asked the old man politely. ‘You look as if you had seen a ghost.’
    The old man was indeed very pale and he clung a little to the bar, but he smiled slightly at Dyson’s way of putting it. ‘In my mind’s eye perhaps,’ he replied. ‘Thank you. May I make it a small whisky?’
    ‘I’d say it’s a miracle you’re here at all, let alone safe and sound,’ said the man behind the bar, who had been staring out of the window at the back, and had seen what had happened . ‘There’ve been many of our customers who weren’t. Most dangerous road in the west country that is now. There’s even been talk of closing the house before some lorry knocks into it and closes it for us.’
    “Bout time the whole village was redeveloped,’ said Rort, ‘judging by some of the places we’ve seen.’ It was not a tactful remark, but Rort was far from consciousness of offence. He always assumed that his standards were shared by the vast majority, had they the honesty to admit it.
    Before picking up the whisky Dyson had bought him, the old man did something most unexpected: one might say that he crossed himself, but he did it in a queer, backwards way that I had never seen before. He then downed the whisky in one gulp.
    Not being myself a Catholic, or an authority on ritual, I might have thought that I was deceived about the old man’s gesture, but Gamble, who was always the most observant among us of what was said or done, asked the old man a question: ‘Does that exorcise the ghost in your mind’s eye?’
    ‘Ghosts,’ said the old man quietly but amiably. ‘Ghosts in the plural. But I have no wish to exorcise them, even if exorcism were possible or relevant. Whereas it is