"At midnight," she repeated. "But Rob, you see, is a nervous lad, and night before last he was so restless he could not sleep, so he begged to be put in the window to cool off. This his mother did, and he sat there for a good half-hour alone, looking out at the moonlight. As his mother is an economical woman there was no candle lit in the room, so he got his pleasure out of the shadows which the great trees made on the highroad, when suddenly--you ought to hear the little fellow tell it--he felt the hair rise on his forehead and all his body grow stiff with a terror that made his tongue feel like lead in his mouth. A something he would have called a horse and a carriage in the daytime, but which, in this light and under the influence of the mortal terror he was in, took on a distorted shape which made it unlike any team he was accustomed to, was going by, not as if being driven over the earth and stones of the road,--though there was a driver in front, a driver with an odd three-cornered hat on his head and a cloak about his shoulders, such as the little fellow remembered to have seen hanging in his grandmother's closet,--but as if it floated along without sound or stir; in fact, a spectre team which seemed to find its proper destination when it turned into Lost Man's Lane and was lost among the shadows of that ill-reputed road." "Pshaw!" was my spirited comment as she paused to take her breath and see how I was affected by this grewsome tale. "A dream of the poor little lad! He had heard stories of this apparition and his imagination supplied the rest." "No; excuse me, madam, he had been carefully kept from hearing all such tales. You could see this by the way he told his story. He hardly believed what he had himself seen. It was not till some foolish neighbor blurted out, 'Why, that was the phantom coach,' that he had any idea he was not relating a dream." My second _Pshaw!_ was no less marked than the first. "He did know about it, notwithstanding," I insisted. "Only he had forgotten the fact. Sleep often supplies us with these lost memories." "Very true, and your supposition is very plausible, Miss Butterworth, and might be regarded as correct, if he had been the only person to see this apparition. But Mrs. Jenkins saw it too, and she is a woman to be believed." This was becoming serious. "Saw it before he did or afterwards?" I asked. "Does she live on the highway or somewhere in Lost Man's Lane?" "She lives on the highway about a half-mile from the station. She was sitting up with her sick husband and saw it just as it was going down the hill. She said it made no more noise than a cloud slipping by. She expects to lose old Rause. No one could behold such a thing as that and not have some misfortune follow." I laid all this up in my mind. My hour of waiting was not likely to prove wholly unprofitable.