The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R. A. Dick Read Free Book Online Page B

know as a matter of curiosity what the next world is really like. Do you have wings and float about on clouds all day, playing golden harps, and where do you sleep at night?”
    “Did I say you were in the first grade?” asked Captain Gregg in disgust. “Dammit, you’re no higher than the kindergarten. There is no day here and no night, it’s eternity, not time.”
    “Oh, dear me!” said Lucy. “Eternity, everything going on for ever and ever—it makes my head reel!”
    “Exactly,” said Captain Gregg, “and yet you expect me to explain it to you in words of one syllable. Reality on earth is all you need worry about at the moment, and without me I doubt if you’d be capable of tackling that!”
    It was astonishing how swiftly the days slipped by on their string of routine. The children were happy at their schools, where they remained for lunch until Lucy should becomemore proficient in the art of cooking. She herself was more than happy in her solitude, knowing that it would be broken each evening by the lively chatter of her daughter Anna, to whom each day brought some scene of stirring adventure, and by the more restrained account of her son Cyril’s doings, and not least by Captain Gregg’s appraisal of the day’s happenings, of which he often did not approve.
    Indeed he was quite fierce in his disapproval of the alterations that Lucy made in the downstairs rooms, though finally he had to admit that the pale gold walls and brocade curtains in the drawing-room set off his Persian carpet and kakemonos and lacquer cabinet to advantage.
    “But what you wanted to get rid of that good suite of furniture for, I can’t think,” he grumbled. “I paid good money for it.”
    “I’m sure you did,” said Lucy, “but my father paid better for the chairs I have in its place, and I got two-pound-ten for yours at the second-hand dealers, which paid for the new mantelpiece.”
    “Robbery—nothing but robbery!” Captain Gregg snorted. “And who wanted a new mantelpiece anyway? I brought that bit of marble from Italy, and now what have you done with it? Made it into a rockery in the back garden! My God! I believe you’d root up your own father’s tombstone and use it for that rockery!”
    “I certainly should if it were made of black marble carved into gargoyles,” Lucy retorted.
    “Notre Dame is covered with gargoyles,” snapped Captain Gregg.
    “Perhaps,” said Lucy, “but I don’t have to sit and warm my feet under Notre Dame.”
    “And I don’t see why you had to move my portrait up here, either,” continued Captain Gregg.
    “You ought to be pleased that I didn’t move it to the attic,” said Lucy, glancing with disfavour at the oil painting of the captain that now hung over the bedroom fireplace.
    “It’s a very good portrait,” said Captain Gregg stiffly.
    “That,” said Lucy, “is a matter of opinion. I think it’s frightful.”
    “Why? What’s wrong with it?” asked Captain Gregg hotly.
    “The hands are terrible,” said Lucy.
    “They weren’t my hands,” replied Captain Gregg. “I took the fellow that painted the picture out to South America and he made that portrait instead of paying me passage money. Of course I couldn’t always be sitting for him and wasting my time, so he’d paint bits of anyone that came along.”
    “He can’t have been a very good artist,” said Lucy.
    “He wasn’t.” Captain Gregg chuckled. “Bigamy was his trouble, though I never did think he was really bad, just weak. Any woman could marry him, and it was surprising how many wanted to turn him into a good husband—a little chap he was, with no chin and canary-coloured hair.”
    “I was referring to his artistic ability,” said Lucy.
    “Oh, well, chuck the thing away, or use it as a cucumber frame,” said Captain Gregg. “I don’t really think so much of it myself.”
    But he was not so easily placated when Lucy hired a gardener to come and set the garden in order and cut down the