Luke was an odd boy but refined. So odd that he used to go about looking in at people’s windows when they forgot to pull down the shades, and so refined that he never wished to be inside with them.
But one night, when he was thirty years old, he looked in at the window of a very refined and elegant mansion and saw a woman. In the simple words of the author, “in court or cottage alike she would be queen.” That’s the kind of woman she was.
And what do you think? She saw Luke looking in. Not only saw him but came over to the window and told him that she had been expecting him. Well, you could have knocked Luke over with a feather. However, he allowed himself to be ushered in by the butler (everything in the house was elegant like that) and up to a room where he found evening clothes, bath-salts and grand things of that nature. On passing a box of books which stood in the hall he read the name on it “before he realized what he was doing.” Of course the minute he thought what an unrefined thing it was to do he stopped, but it was too late. He had already seen that his hostess’s name was “Lady Tintagel.”
When later he met her down in the luxurious dining-room she was just as refined as ever. And so was he. They both were so refined that she had to tell the butler to “serve the fruit in the Oak Room, Thomas.”
Once in the Oak Room she told him her strange tale. It seemed that he was her husband. He didn’t remember it, but he was. He had been drowned some years before and she had wished so hard that he might come back to life that finally he had been born again in the body of Luke Sparrow. It’s funny how things work out like that sometimes.
But Luke, who, as has been said before, was an odd boy, took it very hard and said that he didn’t want to be brought back to life. Not even when she told him that his name was now Sir Nigel Guido Cadross Tintagel, Bart. He became very cross and said that he was going out and drown himself all over again, just to show her that she shouldn’t have gone meddling with his spirit life. He was too refined to say so, but when you consider that he was just thirty, and his wife, owing to the difference in time between the spirit world and this, had gone on growing old until she was now pushing sixty, he had a certain amount of justice on his side. But of course she was Lady Tintagel, and all the lovers of Florence Barclay will understand that that is something.
