“I’ve not given much attention to the matter, Miss.  It’s not long since we came here and Mrs. Packard don’t approve of our gossiping with the neighbors.  But I think the people have mostly been driven away by strange noises and by lights which no one could explain, flickering up over the ceilings from the halls below.  I don’t want to scare you, Miss—­”

“Oh, you won’t scare me.”

“Mrs. Packard wouldn’t like me to do that.  She never listens to a word from us about these things, and we don’t believe the half of it ourselves; but the house does have a bad name, and it’s the wonder of everybody that the mayor will live in it.”

“Sounds?” I repeated.  “Lights?”—­and laughed again.  “I don’t think I shall bother myself about them!” I went gaily out.

It did seem very puerile to me, save as it might possibly account in some remote way for Mrs. Packard’s peculiar mental condition.

Up-stairs I found Ellen.  She was in a talkative mood, and this time I humored her till she had told me all she knew about the house and its ghostly traditions.  This all had come from a servant, a nurse who had lived in the house before.  Ellen herself, like the butler, Nixon, had had no personal experiences to relate, though the amount of extra wages she received had quite prepared her for them.  Her story, or rather the nurse’s story, was to the following effect.

The house had been built and afterward inhabited for a term of years by one of the city fathers, a well-known and still widely remembered merchant.  No unusual manifestations had marked it during his occupancy.  Not till it had run to seed and been the home of decaying gentility, and later of actual poverty, did it acquire a name which made it difficult to rent, though the neighborhood was a growing one and the house itself well-enough built to make it a desirable residence.  Those who had been induced to try living within its spacious walls invariably left at the end of the month.  Why, they hesitated to say; yet if pressed would acknowledge that the rooms were full of terrible sights and sounds which they could not account for; that a presence other than their own was felt in the house; and that once (every tenant seemed to be able to cite one instance) a hand had touched them or a breath had brushed their cheek which had no visible human source, and could be traced to no mortal presence.  Not much in all this, but it served after a while to keep the house empty, while its reputation for mystery did not lie idle.  Sounds were heard to issue from it.  At times lights were seen glimmering through this or that chink or rift in the window curtain, but by the time the door was unlocked and people were able to rush in, the interior was still and dark and seemingly untouched.  Finally the police took a hand in the matter.  They were on the scent just then of a party of counterfeiters and were suspicious of the sounds and lights in this apparently unoccupied dwelling.  But they watched and waited in vain.  One of them got a scare and that was all.  The mystery went unsolved and the sign “To Let” remained indefinitely on the house-front.