The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can guarantee that.  Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information and is, moreover, generally obliged.  He retires with his friend, guided down another staircase by the young gardener, and presently is heard to drive away.  It is now dusk.  Mrs. Rouncewell can trust to the discretion of her two young hearers and may tell them how the terrace came to have that ghostly name.

She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and tells them:  “In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the First—­I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who leagued themselves against that excellent king—­Sir Morbury Dedlock was the owner of Chesney Wold.  Whether there was any account of a ghost in the family before those days, I can’t say.  I should think it very likely indeed.”

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost.  She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

“Sir Morbury Dedlock,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, “was, I have no occasion to say, on the side of the blessed martyr.  But it is supposed that his Lady, who had none of the family blood in her veins, favoured the bad cause.  It is said that she had relations among King Charles’s enemies, that she was in correspondence with them, and that she gave them information.  When any of the country gentlemen who followed his Majesty’s cause met here, it is said that my Lady was always nearer to the door of their council-room than they supposed.  Do you hear a sound like a footstep passing along the terrace, Watt?”

Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper.

“I hear the rain-drip on the stones,” replies the young man, “and I hear a curious echo—­I suppose an echo—­which is very like a halting step.”

The housekeeper gravely nods and continues:  “Partly on account of this division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir Morbury and his Lady led a troubled life.  She was a lady of a haughty temper.  They were not well suited to each other in age or character, and they had no children to moderate between them.  After her favourite brother, a young gentleman, was killed in the civil wars (by Sir Morbury’s near kinsman), her feeling was so violent that she hated the race into which she had married.  When the Dedlocks were about to ride out from Chesney Wold in the king’s cause, she is supposed to have more than once stolen down into the stables in the dead of night and lamed their horses; and the story is that once at such an hour, her husband saw her gliding down the stairs and followed her into the stall where his own favourite horse stood.  There he seized her by the wrist, and in a struggle or in a fall or through the horse being frightened and lashing out, she was lamed in the hip and from that hour began to pine away.”