I don’t know whether Madame had heard anything of these phenomena; but she did report which very much frightened me and Mary Quince.  She asked us who walked in the gallery on which her bed-room opened, making a rustling with her dress, and going down the stairs, and breathing long breaths here and there.  Twice, she said, she had stood at her door in the dark, listening to these sounds, and once she called to know who it was.  There was no answer, but the person plainly turned back, and hurried towards her with an unnatural speed, which made her jump within her door and shut it.

When first such tales are told, they excite the nerves of the young and the ignorant intensely.  But the special effect, I have found, soon wears out The tale simply takes it’s place with the rest.  It was with Madame’s narrative.

About a week after its relation, I had my experience of a similar sort.  Mary Quince went down-stairs for a night-light, leaving me in bed, a candle burning in the room, and being tired.  I fell asleep before her return.  When I awoke the candle had been extinguished.  But I heard a step softly approaching.  I jumped up—­quite forgetting the ghost, and thinking only of Mary Quince—­and opened the door, expecting to see the light of her candle.  Instead, all was dark, and near me I heard the fall of a bare foot on the oak floor.  It was as if some one had stumbled.  I said, ‘Mary,’ but no answer came, only a rustling of clothes and a breathing at the other side of the gallery, which passed off towards the upper staircase.  I turned into my room, freezing with horror, and clapt my door.  The noise wakened Mary Quince, who had returned and gone to her bed half an hour before.

About a fortnight after this, Mary Quince, a very veracious spinster, reported to me, that having got up to fix the window, which was rattling, at about four o’clock in the morning, she saw a light shining from the library window.  She could swear to its being a strong light, streaming through the chinks of the shutter, and moving.  No doubt the link was waved about his head by the angry ‘link-man.’

These strange occurrences helped, I think, just then to make me nervous, and prepared the way for the odd sort of ascendency which, through my sense of the mysterious and super-natural, that repulsive Frenchwoman was gradually, and it seemed without effort, establishing over me.

Some dark points of her character speedily emerged from the prismatic mist with which she had enveloped it.

Mrs. Rusk’s observation about the agreeability of new-comers I found to be true; for as Madame began to lose that character, her good-humour abated very perceptibly, and she began to show gleams of another sort of temper, that was lurid and dangerous.

Notwithstanding this, she was in the habit of always having her Bible open by her, and was austerely attentive at morning and evening services, and asked my father, with great humility, to lend her some translations of Swedenborg’s books, which she laid much to heart.