And the figure came running after them, crying something piteously to them. But that was worse than anything else; they almost tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get out through the gates; in fact, they never stopped running till they were far down the road, and breathless. Then Brian leaned against a wall and surveyed Comethup with horror-struck eyes. "It was the ghost!" he said; "and it ran after us!"
"Yes," said Comethup, slowly, and a little doubtfully, "it was the ghost."
"And it was pretty big, too," said Brian, fanning himself with his cap. "They don't look so large in the dark."
Comethup lay awake a long time that night in his little room under the roof. He was not frightened; he was quite calm as he looked out through the uncurtained window at the blinking stars. He seemed to set everything else aside, and to hear only the piteous, pleading voice crying to him in the garden; he was quite sorry now that he had run away; and very, very sorry, in his childish mind, for the ghost.
"It was a very little ghost," he murmured to himself as he fell asleep.
Comethup saw nothing of Brian for two days after that, and, although he seized the opportunity of making amends to the captain, he said nothing of the adventure to that gentleman. Indeed, Comethup had been haunted by the ghost he had seen, in quite a different sense from that which might have been expected, and the captain seemed altogether unequal to the occasion. He could think of nothing else; was, indeed, so desperately sorry for that lonely little ghost that it lost the terrors it might otherwise have had for him, and melted his heart with pity for its dreadful fate. He lay awake at night, thinking of it in that garden of shadows and decay, wandering alone among the trees, and always with that appealing cry upon its lips. He tried, in a subtle fashion, to put leading questions to the captain, in an endeavour to discover something of the condition of ghosts in general, and little ones in particular; but the captain, being of an eminently practical turn of mind, dismissed the subject curtly enough. So Comethup was thrown on his own resources.
On the evening of the second day, after he had left the captain at the gate, and had saluted him in the fashion they always adopted when Brian was not present, Comethup felt that he could stand this state of uncertainty no longer. He remembered that the captain had once told him that a brave man never shrinks from anything that will help his fellows--a wise and beautiful thing, which Comethup had not forgotten; and surely a ghost, and such a little one, was one of his fellows. Comethup was not quite certain what a ghost was, or what position in the scheme of things it really occupied; but, with that dogged determination which lay behind all the gentleness of his character, he determined, in his simple way, that he could not sleep in his warm and sweet-smelling bed another night while the ghost wandered crying about that desolate garden. With a horrible fear tugging at his heart, and yet with a childish courage urging him on which was greater and stronger than the fear, he took his cap and stole out of the house, and ran as fast as his legs would carry him to the house he had visited with Brian.