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retreat or make a dash for the presumed safety of her bedroom. In order to reach that shelter she would have to pass the spot where the man had ... "stood" hardly seemed an appropriate word.
    Strangely enough, her uncertainty was not tempered by fear. A certain degree of disquiet was present; the occurrence had been unequivocally abnormal. But the apparition had brought with it none of the customary characteristics of visitors from Beyond the Grave--no blast of icy air, no sensation of indescribable terror. He had seemed a rather pleasant ghost. Had he smiled at her, just before he vanished? Ellie wasn't sure. She rather thought he had.
    She went on up the stairs. Stopping by the table, she extended a tentative hand and touched the wall above it. It was a smooth, flat wall, painted pale blue.
    It felt cool and slightly damp.
    Ellie walked along the hall to her room. It was the one she always used when she visited Kate, and it was still furnished in the style she had selected when she was twelve. Early French boudoir, Kate called
    34 Elizabeth Peters it. Ruffled skirts on the dressing table, giit cupids holding up trails of muslin that framed the mirror; a ruffled canopy over the four-poster bed, a ruffled skirt on the overstuffed chair ... There were rosebuds all over everything. Kate had "done" the room, as she did everything, with a thoroughness that bordered on excess, but tonight Ellie found its overwhelming cuteness comforting, a reminder of childhood and the welcome this house and its owner had always extended to her. The fire in the fireplace --a sign of the presence of one Beaseley or another, earlier in the evening--was flickering low; it added the final touch of cozy security to the walled- in brightness of the room.
    In the white-painted bookcases on either side of the fireplace Kate kept a selection of childhood classics.
    After she had undressed, Ellie selected Anne of Green Gables and climbed into bed. But she did not turn at once to the bucolic innocence of that vanished world; instead she sat propped up against her frilled pillows and stared at the opposite wall.
    Four of the cats and one of the dogs had decided to sleep with her. The cats occupied the entire lower half of the bed; Ellie had to sit with her knees pulled up. The dog was Kate's Pekingese, Franklin; although he was the smallest of all the canines, he was probably more capable of repelling burglars than were the larger dogs. Kate insisted that Franklin was always sorry after he bit someone, but he had a quick temper and was getting too old to learn new habits.
    As Ellie looked at him where he lay, on the old sea chest at the foot of the bed, he raised his head and gave her an affectionate curl of the lip. Ellie glanced from his silky russet shape to the furred piles of sleeping cats--silver tabby, blotched calico, tawny Abyssinian, orange Maine coon--and thought about the ghost.
    None of the animals had seemed to notice the apparition.
    That fact didn't fit the mythology of the su-
    DEVIL-MAY-CARE 35
    pernatural. Animals were supposed to be sensitive to such things; in all the ghost stories she had read they snarled, or fled, or bristled--or something. , ..
    The only reaction she had observed was a yowl when she trod on someone's tail.
    Ellie glanced involuntarily at the open doorway.
    She had to leave the door open, since the animals insisted on going and coming during the night. Like most old houses, this one was never silent. The timbers moaned and whispered with changes in weather and humidity, and some members of Kate's zoological collection were nocturnal creatures. Eilie was accustomed to these sounds, including the heavy, plodding footsteps of Ambrose, the thirty-pound Maine coon cat, which sounded exactly like the tread of a large man.
    A rustling, scrabbling sound might have been unnerving if Ellie hadn't known what it was; she continued to watch the open doorway, and when the shining white shape appeared, she greeted it