"Oh, this is delightful. Is it a real, genuine, ancestral ghost?" "In that chamber the Lady Marian Ripon, an ancestress of mine, is said to have died of a broken heart. Her husband, the great-grandson of the Lord Brompton whose portrait you think I resemble, was killed at Teb, and three days after her body was borne to the tomb. This was her private chamber, and here her spirit is said still to linger. It is not a very original ghost, but its authenticity is unquestioned." "Have you ever crossed the threshold?" asked the girl, with mock solemnity. "Not since childhood, and then only in fear and trembling." "This is beginning to be positively weird and uncanny," she murmured, "but I propose to defy the spectre and enter." "Have a care--have a care. But you have no key, Miss Windsor." She was shaking the handle, which seemed loose and flimsy. "Help me. It is not fastened," she cried. They bent their united strength upon the door, which creaked, groaned, and finally burst open with a crash, causing the dust to fly so that Maggie gave a little shriek of dismay. Complete silence and darkness followed the onslaught, and then with a whisper of "Who's afraid?" she drew forth a lamp of diminutive proportions and Etruscan design, and turning the crank produced a brilliant electric flame, which permeated the damp and gloom of the ghostly chamber. Here was, indeed, a monument to decay and mould of the past. A room rife with the cobwebs of ages met their vision where the moth-eaten remains of once gorgeous hangings competed for utter fustiness with the odor of the rotting beams and the dismal aspect of the furniture, some of which had actually fallen to pieces, as though further stability had been incompatible with the long absence of human life. The place seemed almost too desolate for a ghost other than a very morbid spirit in search of penance. In the centre of the room lay in hopeless confusion a pile of all sorts and varieties of garments, many of them of most antiquated description. Plumed hats and velvet knee-breeches of the cavalier period, Jersey jackets and tea-gowns, with Watteau plaits, such as were in fashion when Victoria was queen, were mingled with articles of a more recent date. On the top lay an open volume, the pages of which were brown with dust. Maggie picked it up and read: "Howe'er it be, it seems to me 'Tis only noble to be good; Kind hearts are more than coronets And simple faith than Norman blood." "By whom is that, Lord Brompton? Ah! I see, Lord d'Eyncourt. His name is on the title-page." "An eccentric Victorian poet," said the young man, "of much account in his own day, if I mistake not." "I never heard of him," said Maggie, "but I am little of an antiquarian. It is pretty, though." "I remember," said he, "that we as children used to act theatricals here in those old clothes, duds we ransacked from the closets."