“What shall I do?” she thought.  “I am a woman.  My father is poor.  I have got no chance.  Jurildy is happier to-day than I am, and got more sense.”

She heard a timid rap at her door, and asked, sharply: 

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” said Sleeny’s submissive voice.

“What do you want?” she asked again, without moving.

“Mr. Bott give me two tickets to his seance tonight,”—­Sam called it “seeuns,”—­“and I thought mebbe you’d like to go.”

There was silence for a moment.  Maud was thinking:  “At any rate it will be better than to sit here alone and cry all the evening.”  So she said:  “I’ll come down in a minute.”  She heard Sam’s heavy step descending the stairs, and thought what a different tread another person had; and she wondered whether she would ever “do better” than take Sam Sleeny; but she at once dismissed the thought.  “I can’t do that; I can’t put my hand in a hand that smells so strong of sawdust as Sam’s.  But he is a good soul, and I am sorry for him, every time I look in the glass.”

Looking in the glass, as usual, restored her good humor, and she started off to the ghostly rendezvous with her faithful attendant.  They never talked very much when they were alone together, and this evening both were thoughtful.  Maud had never taken this commerce with ghosts much to heart.  She had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined, that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy.  But it was an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she could not afford to throw it away.  She had not intelligence enough to be disgusted or shocked by it.  If pressed to explain the amount of her faith in the whole business, she would probably have said she thought “there was something in it,” and stopped at that.  In minds like hers, there is no clearly drawn line between the unusual and the supernatural.  An apparent miracle pleased her as it would please a child, without setting her to find out how it was done.  She would consult a wizard, taking the chances of his having occult sources of information, with the same irregular faith in the unlikely with which some ladies call in homoeopathic practitioners.

All the way to the rooms of Bott, she was revolving this thought in her mind:  “Perhaps he could tell me something about Mr. Farnham.  I don’t think much of Bott; he has too many knuckles on his hands.  I never saw a man with so many knuckles.  I wouldn’t mention Mr. Farnham to him to save his life, but I might get something out of him without telling him anything.  He is certainly a very smart man, and whether it’s spirits or not, he knows lots of things.”