“Well, I did sleep on the sofa in her dressing-room with the doors open, and sure enough she came. Thinks I to myself, poor darling, I’ve caught you, and I lay still and watched her with little creeping chills running down my back. It seemed strange to see a ghost light a candle, and unlock a jewel case with a key that had been missing so long. And then when she pulled out the shining jewels and talked aloud in dear Miss Nina’s voice it seemed stranger to me than ever and quite natural, too, so that presently the chill stopped creeping down my back, and I began to want to touch my pretty darling. I stole softly into the room and put both arms tightly around her, and then I found out that it was not a ghost but my mistress, living, and breathing, and struggling desperately to get away from me. But I held her tight and lighted the candle that she had put out. It was just at that moment that the door opened wide, and Mrs. St. Alban, natural as life in her white dress and loose hair, looked in at us.” “Pooh, it was only your fancy. The door was not fastened tight, and a gust of wind tore it open,” exclaimed the spinster. “Then you imagined all the rest.” “But Miss Nina saw it, too, and she was not frightened and did not imagine it, for she did not know that that wicked woman was dead,” Kitty replied. “It was her fancy, nevertheless. She was thinking about the woman that had caused her so much trouble, and so it was easy for her to fancy that she saw her,” declared Miss Drusilla, who was determined not to give in to Kitty’s notion. To do her justice she really believed that the alleged ghost was merely a figment of imaginations stimulated too high by the recent tragedy. But the maid “Convinced against her will Was of the same opinion still.” “Miss Drusilla, you may think what you please, ma’am, but I’m sure I’m right,” she said, respectfully. “And if such a thing could be, I’d believe that that dreadful woman came back every night to watch for my poor darling, Miss Nina, and that _she_ caused her arrest that awful morning.” “Your ghosts would seem at least to be very practical beings, Kitty,” said the spinster, with a faint glimmer of amusement. “Yes ma’am, and isn’t it strange that since that night no one has seen nor heard the ghost? Doesn’t it seem like she could not rest until she had worked evil to my mistress, and that now she rests quiet in her grave at last?” said Kitty, with something like awe, and the old maid finding her so “set in her way” desisted in disgust from the attempt to convert her into a reasonable creature. “‘Ignorance is the mother of superstition,’” she enunciated, loftily, and so dropped the subject. She went to Baltimore, sought out the Fieldings, told them her story, and heard theirs. They were agonized over the dreadful fate that had overtaken the lovely, and hapless young girl. Too late they repented the silence they had kept out of their great love and sympathy.