used to be pulled to very quick, as if some one avoiding her was getting out in haste; but the thing that frightened her most was just this—­that sometimes she used to find a long straight mark from the head to the foot of her bed, as if ’twas made by something heavy lying there, and the place where it was used to feel warm—­as if—­whoever it was—­they only left it as she came into the room.

’But the worst of all was poor Kitty Haplin, the young woman that died of what she seen.  Her mother said it was how she was kept awake all the night with the walking about of some one in the next room, tumbling about boxes, and pulling over drawers, and talking and sighing to himself, and she, poor thing, wishing to go asleep, and wondering who it could be, when in he comes, a fine man, in a sort of loose silk morning-dress, an’ no wig, but a velvet cap on, and to the windy with him quiet and aisy, and she makes a turn in the bed to let him know there was some one there, thinking he’d go away, but instead of that, over he comes to the side of the bed, looking very bad, and says something to her—­but his speech was thick and choakin’ like a dummy’s that id be trying to spake—­and she grew very frightened, and says she, ‘I ask your honour’s pardon, Sir, but I can’t hear you right,’ and with that he stretches up his neck nigh out of his cravat, turning his face up towards the ceiling, and—­grace between us and harm!—­his throat was cut across, and wide open; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint in the bed, and back to her mother with her in the morning, and she never swallied bit or sup more, only she just sat by the fire holding her mother’s hand, crying and trembling, and peepin’ over her shoulder, and starting with every sound, till she took the fever and died, poor thing, not five weeks after.’

And so on, and on, and on flowed the stream of old Sally’s narrative, while Lilias dropped into dreamless sleep, and then the story-teller stole away to her own tidy bed-room and innocent slumbers.

CHAPTER XII.

SOME ODD FACTS ABOUT THE TILED HOUSE—­BEING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF THE GHOST OF A HAND.

I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious.  But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is—­marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter’s tales—­which gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of narration.  Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted.  Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth—­an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can’t.

Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.