Some lean, nervous temperaments, once fairly excited, and in presence of a substantial cause of uneasiness, are very hard to reduce to composure. After she had got back again, Mildred Tarnley fidgeted and turned in her bed, and lay in the dark, with her tired eyes wide open, and imagining, one after another, all sorts of horrors.

She was still in her clothes; so she got up again, and lighted a candle, and stole away, angry with herself and all the world on account of her fussy and feverish condition, and crept up the great stairs, and stealthily reached again the door of the “old soldier’s” room.

Not a sound, not a breath, could she hear from within. Gently she opened the door which no longer resisted. The fire was low in the grate; and, half afraid to look at the bed, she raised the candle and did look.

There lay the “Dutchwoman,” so still that Mrs. Tarnley felt a sickening doubt as she stared at her.

“Lord bless us! she’s never quite well. I wish she was somewhere else,” said Mrs. Tarnley, frowning sharply at her from the door.

Then, with a little effort of resolution, she walked to the bedside, and fancied, doubtfully, that she saw a faint motion as of breathing in the great resting figure, and she placed her fingers upon her arm, and then passed them down to her big hand, which to her relief was warm.

At the touch the woman moaned and turned a little.

“Faugh! what makes her sleep so like dead? She’d a frightened me a’most, if I did not know better. Some folks can’t do nout like no one else.” And Mildred would have liked to shake her up and bid her “snore like other people, and give over her unnatural ways.”

But she did look so pale and fixed, and altogether so unnatural, that Mrs. Tarnley’s wrath was overawed, and, rather uneasily, she retired, and sat for a while at the kitchen fire, ruminating and grumbling.

“If she’s a-goin’ to die, what for should she come all the way to Carwell? Wasn’t Lonnon good enough to die in? ”

Mrs. Tarnley only meant to warm her feet on the fender for a few minutes. But she fell asleep, and wakened, it might be, a quarter of an hour later, and got up and listened.

What was it that overcame old Mildred on this night with so unusual a sense of danger and panic at the presence of this woman? She could not exactly define the cause. But she was miserably afraid of her, and full of unexplainable surmises.

“I can’t go to bed till I try again; I can’t. I don’t know what’s come over me. It seems to me, Lor’ be wi’ us! as if the Evil One was in the house, and I don’t know what I should do—and there’s nout o’ any avail I can do; but quiet I can’t bide, and sleep won’t stay wi’ me while—she’s here, and I’ll just go up again to her room, and if all’s right then, I will lie down, and take it easy for the rest o’ the night, come what, come may; for my old bones is fairly wore out, and I can’t hold my head up no longer.”

Thus resolved, and sorely troubled, the old woman took the candle again and sallied forth once more upon her grizzly expedition.

From the panelled sitting-room, where by this time Charles Fairfield sat in his chair locked in dismal sleep, came the faint red mist of his candle’s light, and here she paused to listen for a moment. Well, all was quiet there, and so on and into the passage, and so into the great hall, as it was called, which seemed to her to have grown chill and cheerless since she was last there, and so again cautiously up the great stair, with its clumsy banister of oak, relieved at every turn by a square oak block terminating in a ball, like the head of a gigantic nine-pin. Black looked the passage through this archway, at the summit of this ascent; and for the first time Mildred was stayed by the sinking of a superstitious horror.

It was by putting a kind of force upon herself that she entered this dark and silent gallery, so far away from every living being in the house, except that one of whom secretly she stood in awe, as of something not altogether of this earth.

This gallery is pretty large, and about midway is placed another arch, with a door-case, and a door that is held open by a hook, and, as often happens in old houses, a descent of a couple of steps here brings you to a different level of the floor.

There may have been a reason of some other sort for the uncomfortable introduction of so many gratuitous steps in doorways and passages, but certainly it must have exercised the wits of the comparatively slow persons who flourished at the period of this sort of architecture, and prevented the drowsiest from falling asleep on the way to their bedrooms.

It happened that as she reached this doorway her eye was caught by a cobweb hanging from the ceiling. For a sharp old servant like Mrs. Tarnley, such festoonery has an attraction of antipathy that is irresistible; she tried to knock it with her hand, but it did not reach high enough, so she applied her fingers to loosen her apron, and sweep it down with a swoop of that weapon.

She was still looking up at the dusty cord that waved in the air, and as she did so she received a long pull by the dress, from an unseen hand below—a determined tweak—tightening and relaxing as she drew a step back, and held the candle backward to enable her to see.

It was not her kitten, which might have playfully followed her up stairs—it was not a prowling rat making a hungry attack. A low titter accompanied this pluck at her dress, and she saw the wide pale face of the Dutchwoman turned up towards her with an odious smile. She was seated on the step, with her shoulder leaning upon the frame of the door.

“You thought I was asleep under the coverlet,” she drawled: “or awake, perhaps, in the other world—dead. I never sleep long, and I don’t die easily—see!”

“And what for are ye out o’ your bed at all, ma’am? Ye’ll break your neck in this house, if ye go walking about, wi’ its cranky steps and stairs, and you blind.”

“When you go blind, old Mildred, you’ll find your memory sharper than you think, and steps, and corners, and doors, and chimney-pieces will come to mind like a picture. What was I about ?”

“Well, what was ye about? Sure I am I don’t know, ma’am.”

“No, I’m sure you don’t,” said she.

“But you should be in your bed—that I know, ma’am.”

Still holding her dress, and with a lazy laugh, the lady made answer——

“So should you, old lass—a pair of us gadders; but I had a reason—I wanted you, old Mildred.”

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know how you’d ’a found me, for I sleep in the five-cornered room, two doors away from the spicery—you’d never ’a found me.”

“I’d have tried—hit or miss—I would not have stayed where I was,” answered the “old soldier.”

“What, not in the state room, ma’am—the finest room in the house, so ’twas always supposed!”

“So be it; I don’t like it,” she answered.

“Ye didn’t hear no noises in’t, sure?” demanded Mildred.

“Not I” said the Dutchwoman. “Another reason quite, girl.”<............