Commendation was so rare that Clarence quite blushed with pleasure; and the pretty little thing was given into his charge, prancing and dancing with pleasure, and expecting much more from sixpence and from Wattlesea than was likely to be fulfilled. [Picture: ‘That is poor Margaret who married your ancestor.’] Griff went out shooting, and the two young ladies and I intended to spend a very rational morning in the bookroom, reading aloud Mme. de La Rochejaquelein’s _Memoirs_ by turns. Our occupations were, on Emily’s part, completing a reticule, in a mosaic of shaded coloured beads no bigger than pins’ heads, for a Christmas gift to mamma—a most wearisome business, of which she had grown extremely tired. Miss Fordyce was elaborately copying our Müller’s print of Raffaelle’s St. John in pencil on cardboard, so as to be as near as possible a facsimile; and she had trusted me to make a finished water-coloured drawing from a rough sketch of hers of the Hillside barn and farm-buildings, now no more. In a pause Ellen Fordyce suddenly asked, ‘What did you mean about that picture?’ ‘Only Clarence said it was like—’ and here Emily came to a dead stop. ‘Grandpapa says it is like me,’ said Miss Fordyce. ‘What, you don’t mean _that_? Oh! oh! oh! is it true? Does she walk? Have you seen her? Mamma calls it all nonsense, and would not have Anne hear of it for anything; but old Aunt Peggy used to tell me, and I am sure grandpapa believes it, just a little. Have you seen her?’ ‘Only Clarence has, and he knew the picture directly.’ She was much impressed, and on slight persuasion related the story, which she had heard from an elder sister of her grandfather’s, and which had perhaps been the more impressed on her by her mother’s consternation at ‘such folly’ having been communicated to her. Aunt Peggy, who was much older than her brother, had died only four years ago, at eighty-eight, having kept her faculties to the last, and handed down many traditions to her great-niece. The old lady’s father had been contemporary with the Margaret of ghostly fame, so that the stages had been few through which it had come down from 1708 to 1830. I wrote it down at once, as it here stands.