On to-morrow night I bid farewell to the neighborhood; but you cannot wait so long, because on this very night you are to be arrested.  It is very well that you sent Grace Davoren, at my suggestion, from the Haunted House to what is supposed to be the haunted cottage, in the mountains, where Nannie Morrissy soon joined her.  I supplied them with provisions, and had a bed and other articles brought to them, according to your own instructions, and I think that, for the present, the safest place of concealment will be there.”

Woodward became terribly alarmed.  It was on the eve of his marriage, and the intelligence almost drove him into distraction.

“I will follow your advice,” said he, “and will take refuge in what is called the haunted cottage, for this night.”

His mysterious friend now left him, and Woodward prepared to seek the haunted cottage in the mountains.  Poor Grace Davoren was in a painful and critical condition, but Woodward had engaged Caterine Collins to attend to her:  for what object, will soon become evident to our readers.

Woodward, after night had set in,—­it was a mild night with faint moonlight,—­took his way towards the cottage that was supposed to be haunted, and which, in those days of witchcraft and. superstition, nobody would think of entering.  We have already described it, and that must suffice for our readers.  On entering a dark, but level moor, he was startled by the appearance of the Black Spectre, which, as on two occasions before, pointed its middogue three times at his heart.  He rushed towards it, but on arriving at the spot he could find nothing.  It had vanished, and he was left to meditate on it as best he might.

We now pass to the haunted cottage itself.  There lay Grace Davoren, after having given birth to a child; there she lay—­the victim of the seducer, on the very eve of dissolution, and beside her, sitting on the bed, the unfortunate Nannie Morrissy, now a confirmed and dying maniac.

“Grace,” said Nannie, “you, like me, were ruined.”

“I was,” replied Grace, in a voice scarcely audible.

“Ay, but you didn’t murder your father, though, as I did; that’s one advantage I have over you—­ha! ha! ha!”

“I’m not so sure of that, Nannie,” replied the dying girl; “but where’s my baby?”

“O! yes, you have had a baby, but Caterine Collins took it away with her.”

“My child! my child! where is my child?” she exclaimed in a low, but husky voice; “where’s my child? and besides, ever since I took that bottle she gave me I feel deadly sick.”

“Will I go for your father and mother—­but above all things for your father?  But then if he punished the villain that ruined you and brought disgrace upon your name, he might be hanged as mine was.”

“Ah!  Nannie,” replied poor Grace; “my father won’t die of the gallows; but he will of a broken heart.”

“Better to be hanged,” said the maniac, whose reason, after a lapse of more than a year, was in some degree returning, precisely as life was ebbing out, “bekase, thank God, there’s then an end to it.”