“Ignorantly what?” inquired Miss Halcombe sharply.

“Ignorantly shocking your feelings,” said Mr. Dempster, looking very much discomposed.

“Upon my word, Mr. Dempster, you pay my feelings a great compliment in thinking them weak enough to be shocked by such an urchin as that!” She turned with an air of satirical defiance to little Jacob, and began to question him directly.  “Come!” she said, “I mean to know all about this.  You naughty boy, when did you see the ghost?”

“Yestere’en, at the gloaming,” replied Jacob.

“Oh! you saw it yesterday evening, in the twilight?  And what was it like?”

“Arl in white—­as a ghaist should be,” answered the ghost-seer, with a confidence beyond his years.

“And where was it?”

“Away yander, in t’ kirkyard—­where a ghaist ought to be.”

“As a ‘ghaist’ should be—­where a ‘ghaist’ ought to be—­why, you little fool, you talk as if the manners and customs of ghosts had been familiar to you from your infancy!  You have got your story at your fingers’ ends, at any rate.  I suppose I shall hear next that you can actually tell me whose ghost it was?”

“Eh! but I just can,” replied Jacob, nodding his head with an air of gloomy triumph.

Mr. Dempster had already tried several times to speak while Miss Halcombe was examining his pupil, and he now interposed resolutely enough to make himself heard.

“Excuse me, Miss Halcombe,” he said, “if I venture to say that you are only encouraging the boy by asking him these questions.”

“I will merely ask one more, Mr. Dempster, and then I shall be quite satisfied.  Well,” she continued, turning to the boy, “and whose ghost was it?”

“T’ ghaist of Mistress Fairlie,” answered Jacob in a whisper.

The effect which this extraordinary reply produced on Miss Halcombe fully justified the anxiety which the schoolmaster had shown to prevent her from hearing it.  Her face crimsoned with indignation—­she turned upon little Jacob with an angry suddenness which terrified him into a fresh burst of tears—­opened her lips to speak to him—­then controlled herself, and addressed the master instead of the boy.

“It is useless,” she said, “to hold such a child as that responsible for what he says.  I have little doubt that the idea has been put into his head by others.  If there are people in this village, Mr. Dempster, who have forgotten the respect and gratitude due from every soul in it to my mother’s memory, I will find them out, and if I have any influence with Mr. Fairlie, they shall suffer for it.”

“I hope—­indeed, I am sure, Miss Halcombe—­that you are mistaken,” said the schoolmaster.  “The matter begins and ends with the boy’s own perversity and folly.  He saw, or thought he saw, a woman in white, yesterday evening, as he was passing the churchyard; and the figure, real or fancied, was standing by the marble cross, which he and every one else in Limmeridge knows to be the monument over Mrs. Fairlie’s grave.  These two circumstances are surely sufficient to have suggested to the boy himself the answer which has so naturally shocked you?”