In the evening, as much with a view of pointing out the baby’s condition to Bessie as for any other reason, I asked her to accompany me to the nursery, and see him put to bed. I found that he slept in a room alone with his wet-nurse, who was engaged in bathing the little creature as we entered. Mrs Graham looked very pretty and delicate as she bent over the bath, attending to the child; but I observed that she never once smiled at nor played with him, as nurses usually do with infants during the process of washing. Little Dick was certainly very attenuated and languid, and even his mother seemed to observe it when pointed out to her. Mrs Graham listened to our conversation with rather an anxious expression on her countenance, and I thought by drawing her out we might gain some clue to the baby’s ill health. ‘Is your own child strong and vigorous?’ I asked her. ‘My own child is dead, madam,’ she replied. ‘It was your first, I presume? You appear very young.’ ‘It was my first. I was twenty last birthday.’ She seemed unwilling to be more communicative, and I did not like to enter directly on the subject of her husband’s death. Poor child! she might have loved him as I did Dick. So, as Bessie had sauntered into the general nursery and left us alone together, I ventured to sound her on another matter, which I thought might be having a secret effect upon her. ‘Have you seen anything of this apparition the servants speak of, Mrs Graham?’ ‘No, madam,’ she replied, quietly. ‘It is very foolish of people to be frightened of they really don’t know what; but no one seems to have been brave enough to try and find out the reason of the mysterious noises heard at night here. You have heard them, perhaps?’ ‘No, madam,’ she said again, without further comment. ‘Would it alarm you to see or hear it?’ I had forced her now to say something in reply. ‘I think not,’ she answered, ‘I think if spirits can come back from the dead, they must do so only in sympathy with those they have left behind; and, if that is possible, and I thought this one came for me, I should only be too thankful to have a glimpse of its face, or to hear the sound of its voice. I think those people who have so much fear of spirits can never have known what it is to lose any one they would lay down their lives to follow wherever it might lead them.’ She spoke in a low, mournful cadence that touched my heart. Poor girl! she was thinking of her husband and her own desolate condition. I felt for and sympathised with her, and before I left the nursery I took her thin hand and pressed it. She looked surprised, but I had only to say, ‘I love my own husband as my life,’ to see the tears run into her eyes, and to know she understood me. Still she was by no means a proper person to perform the part of a mother towards little Dick, and I resolved before I left Poplar Farm to try and persuade Bessie to change her.