and still no tidings came to her of Bryan de Blenkinsopp.  The deserted wife could bear no longer her life in this alien country, and she, too, with all her servants, went away.  Folk, especially those who had always in their hearts suspected her of being an imp of Satan, said that no man saw them go.  Probably she went in search of her husband; but whether or not she ever found him, or whether she made her way back to the land from which she had come, none can say, for from that day to this all trace is lost of husband and of wife.  Only the tale remained in the country people’s minds; and probably it lost nothing in the telling as the years rolled on.

The story of the White Lady of Blenkinsopp became one to which the dwellers by Tyneside loved to listen of a winter’s evening round the fire, and it even began to be whispered that she “walked.”  More than one dweller in the castle claimed to have seen her white-robed figure wandering forlorn through the rooms in which she had spent her short, unhappy wedded life.  Perhaps it may have been due to her influence that by 1542 the roof and interior had been neglected and allowed to fall into decay.

Yet though shorn of all its former grandeur, for some centuries the castle continued to be partly occupied, and as late as the first quarter of last century, in spite of the dread in which the White Lady had come to be held, there were families occasionally living in the less ruined parts of the building.

About the year 1820 two of the more habitable rooms were occupied by a labouring man with his wife and their two children, the youngest a boy of eight.  They had gone there, the parents at least well knowing the reputation of the place; but weeks had passed, their rest had never in any way been disturbed, and they had ceased to think of what they now considered to be merely a silly old story.  All too soon, however, there came a night when shriek upon shriek of ghastly terror rang in the ears of the sleeping husband and wife, and brought them, with sick dread in their hearts, hurrying to the room where their children lay.

“Mither! mither! oh mither!  A lady! a lady!” gasped the sobbing youngest boy, clinging convulsively to his mother.

“What is’t, my bairn?  There’s never a lady here, my bonny boy.  There’s nobody will harm ye.”

But the terrified child would not be comforted.  He had seen a lady, “a braw lady, a’ in white,” who had come to his bedside and, sitting down, had bent and kissed him; she “cried sore,” the child said, and wrung her hands, and told him that if he would but come with her she would make him a rich man, she would show him where gold was buried in the castle; and when the boy answered that he dare not go with her, she had stooped to lift and carry him.  Then he had cried out, and she had slipped from the room just as his father and mother hurried in.