The infirmary itself was a chamber of legend. It was a kind of out-building to which led a long corridor behind just the sort of door my mind was fixed upon, a mere panel that in no way differed from the rest of the wainscoted wall, the very door for a Jesuit to vanish through from the pursuit of mailed myrmidons. At the end of the corridor you went down a flight of stairs, then up another flight into a pretty little green-and-white room, low beamed, with cozy cots, and long windows looking out beyond the rose-bushes, and a slip of velvet lawn, where a terrible-looking and most enchanting alley, with the trees meeting overhead, seemed to lead straight into the twilight of ghostland. It did not take me long to see a white lady slip down that alley, like a white mist swallowed up in sombre night. No power on earth could have convinced me that I had not seen a ghost, and I stood at the window straining my eyes out in waiting for the white lady's return, with both hands frantically clasped upon my heart, which beat as if it projected a spring through my throat. White-faced and appalled, I hurried to the infirmarian, who brought me in something hot to take, and screamed out, "Oh, I've seen her, I've seen her! she was all in white, a real ghost!" That night I was in full fever, and my poor silly little story-books were taken away. But they had done their work, and by the time I was well again my imagination had wrought out the stupendous fiction that was to communicate its thrill even to some of the big girls, and send a dozen of little girls crawling upon their knees and hands, victims of my imagination. The white lady I conceived to be the ghost of a beautiful Catholic persecuted in the days of Tyburn. She lived in this old manor-house, for we knew that the Ivies had been a manor. In her terror she had flown through the panel-door leading to the infirmary. The flight of stairs, of course, in those days continued beyond the floor, and the subterranean passage probably led round by the courtyard to the gate at the end of the dark alley. I decided that there must be several whitened bones under the floor of this corridor and the infirmary, and so convinced all my companions, even Frank, that whining little cad whom we all so heartily detested, that on play-days, during the holidays, on Sunday afternoons, every moment we could spend in secrecy, in turn two of us (companionship was necessary to add to the excitement of labour and the terrors of consequences) would crawl away from the rest with penknives and pencils, and assiduously cut away at the wooden floor until we had made a hole large enough to insert our little fists underneath. It must be admitted we always found something hard and white, which proved my theory, and those bits of dry chips we handled in awe.