struck a match and, getting up, lighted candles. Her hand shook, but she remembered that she must be firm with herself.
“I must not be nervous,” she said, and looked the room over from end to end.
But it contained no living creature, nor any sign that living creature had entered it since she had lain down to rest. Gradually the fast beating of her heart had slackened, and she passed her hand over her face in bewilderment.
“It wasn’t like a dream at all,” she murmured; “it really wasn’t. I felt it.”
Still as absolutely nothing was to be found, the sense of reality diminished somewhat, and being so healthy a creature, she regained her composure, and on going back to bed slept well until Jane brought her early tea.
Under the influence of fresh morning air and sunlight, of ordinary breakfast and breakfast talk with the Osborns, her first convictions receded so far that she laughed a little as she related the incident.
“I never had such a real dream in my life,” she said; “but it must have been a dream.”
“One’s dreams are very real sometimes,” said Hester.
“Perhaps it was the Palstrey ghost,” Osborn laughed. “It came to you because you ignore it.” He broke off with a slight sudden start and stared at her a second questioningly. “Did you say it put its hand on your side?” he asked.
“Don’t tell her silly things that will frighten her. How ridiculous of you,” exclaimed Hester sharply. “It’s not proper.”
Emily looked at both of them wonderingly.
“What do you mean?” she said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. It won’t frighten me, Hester. I never even heard of a Palstrey ghost.”
“Then I am not going to tell you of one,” said Captain Osborn a little brusquely, and he left his chair and went to the sideboard to cut cold beef.
He kept his back towards them, and his shoulders looked uncommunicative and slightly obstinate. Hester’s face was sullen. Emily thought it sweet of her to care so much, and turned upon her with grateful eyes.
“I was only frightened for a few minutes, Hester,” she said. “My dreams are not vivid at all, usually.”
But howsoever bravely she ignored the shock she had received, it was not without its effect, which was that occasionally there drifted into her mind a recollection of the suggestion that Palstrey had a ghost. She had never heard of it, and was in fact of an orthodoxy so ingenuously entire as to make her feel that belief in the existence of such things was a sort of defiance of ecclesiastical laws. Still, such stories were often told in connection with old places, and it was natural to wonder what features marked this particular legend. Did it lay hands on people’s sides when they were asleep? Captain Osborn had asked his question as if with a sudden sense of recognition. But she would not let herself think of the matter, and she would not make inquiries.
The result was that she did not sleep well for several nights. She was annoyed at herself, because she found that she kept lying awake as if listening or waiting. And it was not a good thing to lose one’s sleep when one wanted particularly to keep strong.
Jane Cupp during this week was, to use her own words, “given quite a turn” by an incident which, though a small matter, might have proved untoward in its results.
The house at Palstrey, despite its age, was in a wonderful state of preservation, the carved oak balustrades of the stairways being considered particularly fine.
“What but Providence,” said Jane piously, in speaking to her mother the next morning, “made me look down the staircase as I passed through the upper landing just before my lady was going down to dinner. What but Providence I couldn’t say. It certainly wasn’t because I’ve done it before that I remember. But just that one evening I was obliged to cross the landing for something, and my eye just lowered itself by accident, and there it was!”
“Just where it would have tripped her up. Good Lord! it makes my heart turn over to hear you tell it. How big a bit of carving was it?” Mrs. Cupp’s opulent chest trimmings heaved.
“Only a small piece that had broken off from old age and worm-eatenness, I suppose, but it had dropped just where she wouldn’t have caught sight of it, and ten to one would have stepped on it and turned her ankle and been thrown from the top to the bottom of the whole flight. Suppose I hadn’t seen it in time to pick it up before she went down. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Mother!”
“I should say so!” Mrs. Cupp’s manner approached the devout. This incident it was which probably added to Jane’s nervous sense of responsibility. She began to watch her mistress’s movements with hypersensitive anxiety. She fell into the habit of going over her bedroom two or three times a day, giving a sort of examination to its contents.
“Perhaps I’m so fond of her that it’s making me downright silly,” she said to her mother; “but it seems as if I can’t help it. I feel as if I’d like to know everything she does, and go over the ground to make sure of it before she goes anywhere. I’m so proud of her, mother; I’m just as proud as if I was some connection of the family, instead of just her maid. It’ll be such a splendid thing if she keeps well and everything goes as it should. Even people like us can see what it means to a gentleman that can go back nine hundred years. If I was Lady Maria Bayne, I’d be here and never leave her. I tell you nothing could drive me from her.”
“You are well taken care of,” Hester had said. “That girl is devoted to you. In her lady’s maid’s way she’d fight for your life.”
“I think she is as faithful to me as Ameerah is to you,” Emily answered. “I feel sure Ameerah would fight for you.”
Ameerah’s devotion in these days took the form of a deep-seated hatred of the woman whom she regarded as her mistress’s enemy.
“It is an evil thing that she should take this place,” she said. “She is an old woman. What right hath she to think she may bear a son. Ill luck will come of it. She deserves any ill fortune which may befall her.”
“Sometimes,” Lady Walderhurst once said to Osborn, “I feel as if Ameerah disliked me. She looks at me in such a curious, stealthy way.”
“She is admiring you,” was his answer. “She thinks you are something a little supernatural, because you are so tall and have such a fresh colour.”
There was in the park at Palstrey Manor a large ornamental pool of water, deep and dark and beautiful because of the age and hugeness of the trees which closed around it, and the water plants which encircled and floated upon it. White and yellow flags and brown velvet rushes grew thick about its edge, and water-lilies opened and shut upon its surface. An avenue of wonderful limes led down to a flight of mossy steps, by which in times gone by people had descended to the boat which rocked idly in the soft green gloom. There was an island on it, on which roses had been planted and left to run wild; early in the year daffodils and other spring flowers burst up through the grass and waved scented heads. Lady Walderhurst had discovered the place during her honeymoon, and had loved it fondly ever since. The avenue leading to it was her favourite walk; a certain seat under a tree on the island her favourite resting-place.
“It is so still there,” she had said to the Osborns. “No one ever goes there but myself. When I have crossed the little old bridge and sit down among the greenness with my book or work, I feel as if there was no world at all. There is no sound but the rustle of the leaves and the splash of the moor-hens who come to swim about. They don’t seem to be afraid of me, neither do the thrushes and robins. They know I shall only sit still and watch them. Sometimes they come quite near.”
She used, in fact, to take her letter-writing and sewing to the sweet, secluded place and spend hours of pure, restful bliss. It seemed to her that her life became more lovely day by day.
[Illustration: Hester Osborn]
Hester did not like the pool. She thought it too lonely and silent. She preferred