Calling Hickens to his aid in the afternoon, he went slowly up to the apartments of Lady Chandos, and I saw no more of him until dinner time. Meanwhile I wrote a long letter to Miss Annette, expressing my great sympathy with the illness amidst the schoolgirls, and begging her to write and tell me which of them were ill, and also to let me know the very instant that the house should be safe again, for that I wanted to come to it. In the evening Mr. Chandos, his lamp at his elbow, read aloud from a volume of Tennyson. I worked. Never had poetry sounded so sweet before; never will it sound sweeter; and when I went upstairs to bed, the melodious measure, and that still more melodious voice, yet rang in my ears. To bed, but not to rest. What was the matter with me? I know not, but I could not sleep. Tossing and turning from side to side, now a line of the poems would recur to me: now would rise up the face of Mr. Chandos; now the remembrance of Lady Chandos's vexation at my being there. As the clock struck one, I rose from my uneasy bed, determined to try what walking about the chamber would do. Pulling the blind aside, quietly opening the shutters, I paused to look out on the lovely night, its clear atmosphere and its shining stars nearly as bright as day. Why!—was I awake? or was I dreaming? There, under the shade of the thick trees, keeping close to them, as if not wishing to be seen, but all too plain to me, nevertheless, paced Mr. Chandos, wrapped in a large over-coat. What had become of his lame foot? That he walked slowly, as one does who is weak, there was no denying, but still he did not walk _lame_. Did, or would, a state of somnambulancy cause a disabled limb to recover temporary service and strength? Every sense I possessed, every reason, answered no. As I gazed at the sight with bewildered brain and beating heart, Mrs. Penn's words flashed over me—that it was the ghost of the dead Sir Thomas which was said to haunt the groves of Chandos. Could it be? Was I looking at a real ghost? We all know how susceptible the brain is to superstition in the lonely midnight hours, and I succumbed in that moment to an awful terror. Don't laugh at me. With a smothered cry, I flew to the bed, leaped in, and covered my face with the bedclothes. One idea was uppermost amid the many that crowded on me. If that was indeed the spirit of Sir Thomas, he must have died a younger man than I supposed, and have borne a great likeness to his son, Harry Chandos.