The contrast and other stories Author:Elinor Glyn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE IRTONWOOD GHOST CHAPTER I Mrs. Charters arrived at Euston in plenty of time for the train to Ileton. She was a woman who was well served, and her footm... more »an had already got her all that she required, and she retired with a paper to the farther side of the compartment. " You need not wait, Thomas," she said. " There will probably be no one else getting in, and it is a corridor train." So Thomas touched his hat and left. Just before the guard gave the signal to start, a man—evidently a gentleman— opened the door of the carriage and entered. He had been walking leisurely up and down the platform, and if she had known it, had observed her maid and footman, looked at her luggage, and ascertained her destination. It was the same as his own, Irtonwood Manor, that really charmingly romantic old place Ada Hardress and her obedient husband had just taken from the Walworths for a year. "It is too exquisitely ghostly, pet! " she had written to Esther Charters. " Creaking panelling, underground passages, haunted library, and a big cedar-wood bedroom where the White Lady appears. There is no electric light, and a person with your sensibilities can be perfectly certain to receive a thrill! Come and spend Christmas with us ! " And Mrs. Charters had accepted—won by this alluring description! And was now, the day before Christmas Eve, on her way thither. She was a tall, slender woman of twenty- eight or thirty, perhaps. She was notbeautiful, but every single thing she put on seemed to enhance her grace. Rather plaintive and distinguished refinement appeared to be the note which first struck strangers about her. That bore, Algernon Alexander Charters, had joined friends in another world some three years before this Christmas Eve, leaving his widow most comfortably p...« less