He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to penetrate even modern provincial society, that no man may tell a ghost story without leave. Rose threw a merry glance at him. They two were very old friends. Dr. Baker had pulled out her first teeth and given her a sixpence afterward for each operation. The pull was soon forgotten; the sixpence lived on gratefully in a child’s warm memory. ‘Tell it,’ she said; ‘we give you leave. We won’t interrupt you unless you put in too many inventions.’ ‘You invite me to break the first law of storytelling, Miss Rose,’ said the doctor, lifting a finger at her. ‘Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it. However, I couldn’t tell it if I would. I don’t know what makes the poor ghost walk; and if you do, I shall say you invent. But at any rate there is a ghost, and she walks along the side of High Fell at midnight every Midsummer day. If you see her and she passes you in silence, why you only got a fright for your pains. But if she speaks to you, you die within the year. Old John Backhouse is a widower with one daughter. This girl saw the ghost last Midsummer day, and Miss Leyburn and I are now doing our best to keep her alive over the next; but with very small prospect of success.’ ‘What is the girl dying of?--fright?’ asked Mrs. Seaton harshly. ‘Oh, no!’ said the doctor hastily, ‘not precisely. A sad story; better not inquire into it. But at the present moment the time of her death seeing likely to be determined by the strength of her own and other people’s belief in the ghost’s summons.’ Mrs. Seaton’s grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. She put up her eye-glass and looked at Catherine. ‘An unpleasant household, I should imagine,’ she said shortly, ‘for a young lady to visit.’ Doctor Baker looked at the rector’s wife, and a kind of flame came into his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and he was a quick-tempered mercurial sort of Man. ‘I presume that one’s guardian angel may have to follow one sometimes into unpleasant quarters,’ he said hotly. ‘If this girl lives, it will be Miss Leyburn’s doing; if she dies, saved and comforted, instead of lost in this world and the next, it will be Miss Leyburn’s doing too. Ah, my dear young lady, let me alone! You tie my tongue always, and I won’t have it.’