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    The pale passenger became paler.
    The second step beyond Paris, another invasion! A group of Germans surged aboard, loud in their disbelief of ancestral spirits, doubtful of politics, some even carrying books titled Was God Ever Home?
    The Orient ghost sank deeper in his x-ray image bones.
    “Oh, dear,” cried Miss Minerva Halliday, and ran to her own compartment to plunge back and toss down a cascade of books.
    “ Hamlet !” she cried, “his father, yes? A Christmas Carol . Four ghosts! Wuthering Heights . Kathy returns , yes? To haunt the snows? Ah, The Turn of the Screw , and ... Rebecca ! Then—my favorite! The Monkey’s Paw ! Which?”
    But the Orient ghost said not a Marley word. His eyes were locked, his mouth sewn with icicles.
    “Wait!” she cried.
    And opened the first book...
    Where Hamlet stood on the castle wall and heard his ghost-of-a-father moan and so she said these words:
    “ ‘Mark me... my hour is almost come... when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames... must render up myself…’ ”
    And then she read:
    “ ‘I am thy father’s spirit,/Doomed for a certain term to walk the night’ ”
    And again:
    “ ‘... If thou didst ever thy dear father love... O, God!... Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.’ ”
    And yet again:
    “ ‘... Murder most foul...’ ”
    And the train ran in the night as she spoke the last words of Hamlet’s father’s ghost:
    “ ‘... Fare thee well at once...’ ”
    “ ‘... Adieu, adieu! Remember me.’ ”
    And she repeated:
    “ ‘... remember me!’ ”
    And the Orient ghost quivered. She pretended not to notice but seized a further book:
    “ ‘... Marley was dead, to begin with…’ ”
    As the Orient train thundered across a twilight bridge above an unseen stream. Her hands flew like birds over the books. “ ‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!’ ”
    Then:
    “ ‘The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped off into the fog—’ ”
    And wasn’t there the faintest echo of a horse’s hooves behind, within the Orient ghost’s mouth?
    “ ‘The beating beating beating, under the floorboards of the Old Man’s Telltale Heart!’” she cried, softly.
    And there ! like the leap of a frog. The first faint pulse of the Orient ghost’s heart in more than an hour. The Germans down the corridor fired off a cannon of disbelief.
    But she poured the medicine:
    “ ‘The Hound bayed out on the Moor—’”
    And the echo of that bay, that most forlorn cry, came from her traveling companion’s soul, wailed from his throat.
    As the night grew on and the moon arose and a Woman in White crossed a landscape, as the old nurse said and told, and a bat that became a wolf that became a lizard scaled a wall on the ghastly passenger’s brow.
    And at last the train was silent with sleeping, and Miss Minerva Halliday let the last book drop with the thump of a body to the floor.
    “ Requiescat in pace ?” whispered the Orient traveler, eyes shut.
    “Yes.” She smiled, nodding. “ Requiescat in pace .”
    And they slept. And at last they reached the sea.
    * * *
    And there was mist, which became fog, which became scatters of rain, like a proper drench of tears from a seamless sky.
    Which made the ghastly passenger open, ungum his mouth, and murmur thanks for the haunted sky and the shore visited by phantoms of tide as the train slid into the shed where the mobbed exchange would be made, a full train becoming a full boat.
    The Orient ghost who stood well back, the last figure on a now self-haunted train. “Wait,” he cried, softly, piteously. “That boat! There’s no place on it to hide! And the customs !”
    But the customs men took one look at the pale face snowed under the dark cap and earmufis, and swiftly flagged the wintry soul onto the ferry.
    To be surrounded by dumb voices, ignorant elbows, layers of people shoving as the boat shuddered and moved and the nurse saw her fragile icicle melt yet again.
    It was a mob of