The ghostly repute of the place and the attraction of new milk, cheese cakes, and syllabubs, had drawn a certain number of those satiated pleasure-seekers who were ever on the alert for a new sensation, among whom there was none more active or more noisy than Lady Sarah Tewkesbury. She had made the haunted Abbey in a manner her own, had invited her friends to midnight parties to watch for the ghost, and to morning parties to eat syllabubs and dance on the grass. She had brought a shower of gold into the lap of the miserly freeholder, and had husband and wife completely under her thumb. Doler, the husband, had fought in the civil war, and Mrs. Doler had been a cook in the Fairfax household; but both had scrupulously sunk all Cromwellian associations since his Majesty’s return, and in boasting, as he often did boast, of having fought desperately and been left for dead at the battle of Brentford, Mr. Doler had been careful to suppress the fact that he was a hireling soldier of the Parliament. He would weep for the martyred King, and tell the story of his own wounds, until it is possible he had forgotten which side he had fought for, in remembering his personal prowess and sufferings. So far there had been disappointment as to the ghost. Sounds had been heard of a most satisfying grimness, during those midnight and early morning watchings; rappings, and scrapings, and scratching on the wall, groanings and meanings, sighings and whisperings behind the wainscote; but nothing spectral had been seen; and Mrs. Doler had been severely reprimanded by her patrons and patronesses for the unwarrantable conduct of a spectre which she professed to have seen as often as she had fingers and toes. It was the phantom of a nun—a woman of exceeding beauty, but white as the linen which banded her cheek and brow. There was a dark story of violated oaths, priestly sin, and the sleepless conscience of the dead, who could not rest even in that dreadful grave where the sinner had been immured alive, but must needs haunt the footsteps of the living, a wandering shade. Some there were who disbelieved in the traditions of that living grave, and who even went so far as to doubt the ghost; but the spectre had an established repute of more than a century, was firmly believed in by all the children and old women of the neighbourhood, and had been written about by students of the unseen. One of Lady Sarah’s parties took place at full moon, not long after the visit to Deptford, and Lord Fareham’s barge was again employed, this time on a nocturnal expedition up the river to the fields near the haunted Abbey, to carry Hyacinth, her sister, De Malfort, Lord Rochester, Sir Ralph Masaroon, Sir Denzil Warner, and a bevy of wits and beauties—beauties who had, some of them, been carrying on the beauty-business and trading in eyes and complexion for more than one decade, and who loved that night season when paint might be laid on thicker than in the glare of day.