“Perhaps not so much of a nightmare as you suppose,” rejoined the uncle, and then proceeded to narrate his own experiences. I remember thinking how much better Frampton told the story than he did, in spite of his rather unorthodox language. “Phew! that alters the whole question. Corroborative evidence with a vengeance—evidence that one might almost take into court. For even if _you_ had been dining not wisely, your sister hadn’t, I know. Anyhow, we three staid gentlefolk could create a pretty sensation with our three independent testimonies. To think that a belief in ghosts should be forced upon me at my age! Why I shall be dragged next into believing the village legend.” “What is it? I never even heard of it.” “That Ronald’s old carriage is somehow mixed up with the quarrel between Thorpe and Broadwater—that it stands in the way of their family union. So you see, young gentlemen, where you’ve got to look for a wife as soon as the carriage is gone. But it doesn’t look like it yet. Old Thorpe’s dead, and the house shut up, and the only survivor of the family is on the point, they tell me, of marrying her cousin. Above all, you guard the old carriage, Heyward, as if it were a priceless heirloom. But perhaps you are right; it isn’t your business to get rid of it.” III So the old carriage mouldered on in the coach-house, and its net-work of cobwebs grew grimier each day. How the spiders maintained themselves was a mystery, for no fly could have run the blockade of the window, even if the inducement had been greater. At last Ronald and I wove a legend around them in our turn, which terrified us more than did the carriage itself. We decided that, after long years of mutual slaughter, the victory had rested in the end with two or three hoary monsters, who had ensconced themselves within the framework of the ruined carriage, from which they looked out upon the solitude they were creating. Little by little the uncanny idea grew upon us till, regardless of all probability, we fancied we could see their eyes peering out of the darkness. More than once we made illicit expeditions at midnight in the hope that we might find the ghostly coachman cleaning and repairing his equipage for another sortie. But we could see nothing. If either of us had gone alone, the result might have been different; we should have seen, or pretended to see, many matters of interest. November was, as a rule, our month of storms at Broadwater, though February often ran it close; and, in the year that followed upon Frampton’s story, a gale broke upon us on the third of the month that beat the record of our times for violence. We had not been without warning of its coming. The sea had been “crying out” at intervals—sure token that the storm had paused to gather breath, bidding the sea take forward its message to the shore.