and scramblings.  But no one could convince Ellen Whitelaw that the sounds she had heard on new-year’s-day were produced by anything so earthly as a rat.  With that willingness to believe in a romantic impossibility, rather than in a commonplace improbability so natural to the human mind, she was more ready to conceive the existence of a ghost than that her own sense of hearing might have been less powerful than her fancy.  About the footsteps she was quite as positive as she was about the scream; and in the last instance she had the evidence of Mrs. Tadman’s senses to support her.

She was surprised to find one day, when the household drudge, Martha Holden, had been cleaning the passage and rooms in that deserted wing—­a task very seldom performed—­that the girl had the same aversion to that part of the house which she felt herself, but of which she had never spoken in the presence of the servants.

“If it wasn’t for Mrs. Tadman driving and worrying after me all the time I’m at work, I don’t think I could stay there, mum,” Martha told her mistress.  “It isn’t often I like to be fidgetted and followed; but anything’s better than being alone in that unked place.”

“It’s rather dark and dreary, certainly, Martha,” Ellen answered with an admirable assumption of indifference; “but, as we haven’t any of us got to live there, that doesn’t much matter.”

“It isn’t that, mum.  I wouldn’t mind the darkness and the dreariness—­and I’m sure such a place for spiders I never did see in my life; there was one as I took down with my broom to-day, and scrunched, as big as a small crab—­but it’s worse than, that:  the place is haunted.”

“Who told you that?”

“Sarah Batts.”

“Sarah Batts!  Why, how should she know anything about it?  She hasn’t been here so long as you; and she came straight from the workhouse.”

“I think master must have told her, mum.”

“Your master would never have said anything so foolish.  I know that he doesn’t believe in ghosts; and he keeps all his garden-seeds in the locked room at the end of the passage; so he must go there sometimes himself.”

“O yes, mum; I know that master goes there.  I’ve seen him go that way at night with a candle.”

“Well, you silly girl, he wouldn’t use the room if he thought it was haunted, would he?  There are plenty more empty rooms in the house.”

“I don’t know about that, I’m sure, mum; but anyhow I know Sarah Batts told me that passage was haunted.  ‘Don’t you never go there, Martha,’ she says, ’unless you want to have your blood froze.  I’ve heard things there that have froze mine.’  And I never should go, mum, if it wasn’t for moth—­Mrs. Tadman’s worrying and driving, about the place being cleaned once in a way.  And Sarah Batts is right, mum, however she may have got to know it; for I have heard things.”

“What things?”

“Moaning and groaning like, as if it was some one in pain; but all very low; and I never could make out where it came from.  But as to the place being haunted, I’ve no more doubt about it than about my catechism.”