Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/143

 is anything about this house—this place that was a house—that is at all—queer?"

David sat bolt upright and stared at her fixedly.

"You have been talking to Michael," he accused her. "Michael says that ill luck is brooding over the whole place like a summer thunderstorm and that there is no telling where the bolt will strike. I never saw a person who could believe such strange things as Michael."

"No," Betsey maintained stoutly, "it is not from anything he said. It is only what I have seen myself."

She sat looking at him, first with sharp penetration, then with the dawn of a sudden discovery. She was possessed of less soaring ambition than David, but of a more keenly observant eye.

"You have seen something yourself," she announced. "You are trying to argue me out of it because you don't want to believe your own eyes. Tell me what you have seen."

David was silent for a minute, apparently struggling obstinately against his own convictions.

"It was just—lights, and—and something moving," he confessed shamefacedly at last. "It might have been almost anything, wind, fireflies, moonlight on that broken mirror. I'm not going to let Michael make me believe in goblins."

"It is only lately that I have seen it," Betsey