occurred.  During these months, the darkest of the year, scarcely a night passed without the recurrence of these inexplicable cries.  Nothing, it was said, had ever been seen,—­at least, nothing that could be identified.  Some people, bolder or more imaginative than the others, had seen the darkness moving, Mrs. Jarvis said, with unconscious poetry.  It began when night fell, and continued, at intervals, till day broke.  Very often it was only all inarticulate cry and moaning, but sometimes the words which had taken possession of my poor boy’s fancy had been distinctly audible,—­“Oh, mother, let me in!” The Jarvises were not aware that there had ever been any investigation into it.  The estate of Brentwood had lapsed into the hands of a distant branch of the family, who had lived but little there; and of the many people who had taken it, as I had done, few had remained through two Decembers.  And nobody had taken the trouble to make a very close examination into the facts.  “No, no,” Jarvis said, shaking his head, “No, no, Cornel.  Wha wad set themsels up for a laughin’-stock to a’ the country-side, making a wark about a ghost?  Naebody believes in ghosts.  It bid to be the wind in the trees, the last gentleman said, or some effec’ o’ the water wrastlin’ among the rocks.  He said it was a’ quite easy explained; but he gave up the hoose.  And when you cam, Cornel, we were awfu’ anxious you should never hear.  What for should I have spoiled the bargain and hairmed the property for no-thing?”

“Do you call my child’s life nothing?” I said in the trouble of the moment, unable to restrain myself.  “And instead of telling this all to me, you have told it to him,—­to a delicate boy, a child unable to sift evidence or judge for himself, a tender-hearted young creature—­”

I was walking about the room with an anger all the hotter that I felt it to be most likely quite unjust.  My heart was full of bitterness against the stolid retainers of a family who were content to risk other people’s children and comfort rather than let a house be empty.  If I had been warned I might have taken precautions, or left the place, or sent Roland away, a hundred things which now I could not do; and here I was with my boy in a brain-fever, and his life, the most precious life on earth, hanging in the balance, dependent on whether or not I could get to the reason of a commonplace ghost-story!  I paced about in high wrath, not seeing what I was to do; for to take Roland away, even if he were able to travel, would not settle his agitated mind; and I feared even that a scientific explanation of refracted sound or reverberation, or any other of the easy certainties with which we elder men are silenced, would have very little effect upon the boy.