Trying to find the title of an old short story I read roughly 5 years ago. If memory serves, The protagonist was a man in his late 20s to early 30s and the story takes place in Europe shortly before the beginning of World War I. The man traveled to the countryside as per the directions of his physician as a means to get fresh air to remedy his poor health. I can't remember if the character was truly suffering from tuberculosis, but his ailment appeared to be related to his lungs.
Upon arriving at his new town, he goes to pay a visit to the home of a friend's acquaintance that also lived there, and was waiting for tea when a young girl struck up a conversation when the two of them were alone in the parlor.
She tells him about a tragedy that struck the estate a year prior, when a hunting party left one morning and drowned in the swamps behind the property, before leaving the protagonist alone to wait. Her account turns out to be false and is revealed by the narrator to be an on-the-spot fabrication created to make the protagonist believe that he had seen a ghost when he saw the hunting party wander out from the tree line.
The only other detail I can remember was that the author would later die as a result of participating in either the First or the Second World War.
