Although Mrs. Whitelaw did not, like Mrs. Tadman, associate the idea of the stranger’s visit with any apprehension of her husband’s impending ruin, she could not deny that some kind of change had arisen in him since that event.  He had always drunk a good deal, in his slow quiet manner, which impressed people unacquainted with his habits with a notion of his sobriety, even when he was steadily emptying the bottle before him; but he drank more now, and sat longer over his drink, and there was an aspect of trouble and uneasiness about him at times which fairly puzzled his wife.  Of course the most natural solution for all this was the one offered by the dismally prophetic Tadman.  Stephen Whitelaw had been speculating or gambling, and his affairs were in disorder.  He was not a man to be affected by anything but the most sordid considerations, one would suppose.  Say that he had lost money, and there you had a key to the whole.

He got into a habit of sitting up at night, after the rest of the household had gone to bed.  He had done this more or less from the time of his marriage; and Mrs. Tadman had told Ellen that the habit was one which had arisen within the last few months.

“He would always see to the fastenings of the house with his own eyes,” Mrs. Tadman said; “but up to last autumn he used to go upstairs with me and the servants.  It’s a new thing for him to sit up drinking his glass of grog in the parlour by himself.”

The new habit seemed to grow upon Mr. Whitelaw more rapidly after that visit of the stranger’s.  He took to sitting up till midnight—­an awful hour in a farm-house; and Ellen generally found the spirit-bottle empty in the morning.  Night after night, he went to bed soddened with drink.  Once, when his kinswoman made some feeble remonstrance with him about this change in his habits, he told her savagely to hold her tongue—­he could afford to drink as much as he pleased—­he wasn’t likely to come upon her to pay for what he took.  As for his wife, she unhappily cared nothing what he did.  He could not become more obnoxious to her than he had been from the first hour of her acquaintance with him, let him do what he would.

Little by little, finding no other explanation possible, Mrs. Whitelaw grew to believe quite firmly in the supernatural nature of that unforgotten cry.  She remembered the unexplainable footstep which she had heard in the padlocked room in the early dusk of that new-year’s-day, when Mrs. Tadman and she explored the old house; and she associated these two sounds in her mind as of a like ghostly character.  From this time forward she shrank with a nervous terror from that darksome passage leading to the padlocked door at the end of the house.  She had never any occasion to go in this direction.  The rooms in this wing were low, dark, and small, and had been unused for years.  It was scarcely any wonder if rats had congregated behind the worm-eaten wainscot, to scare nervous listeners with their weird scratchings