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“Bosh!” shrilled Humbert, the conversation beginning to get on his nerves, as I could see. “Don’t talk such nonsense around here. You got no more sense than a dramatic critic, no? Forget it.”

He addressed the company. “You all get four weeks’ salary. Come around to the office tomorrow and get it.”

This was generous treatment, and they thanked him for it in their various and characteristic ways. The audience had departed by now, and the company was breaking up, its members going to their various dressing rooms. Two young men came on the stage, and I recognized them as reporters. The news had got quickly to the papers—the dramatic critics having telephoned, evidently. They approached Humbert, but he waved them over to me.

“Talk to that man there,” he said. “He knows all about ghosts—no, wait, maybe Bill Warrington can tell you about the ghost of Ambrose Benedict and about how we ain’t got no actors nowadays like they used to have when he was young, in fourteen hundred and ninety two.” But Bill Warrington had gone to his dressing room, so they turned to me for what information I could give them.

I told them what had happened, and showed them the dagger, which I still held in my hand.

“Do you mean to say that you stabbed a ghost with