The sounds approached nearer: they seemed to come from one in the very extremity of terror, and, just then Sinnett entered the kitchen. Perhaps it has not been forgotten that the windows, of modern date, looked on the side walk, and thence towards the church and village. The shutters were not yet closed, the blinds not drawn down. In another instant, as the frightened women stood together in a group, one window was flung up, and a form propelled itself in, smashing a pane of glass. It proved to be Joe, the carter's boy; a sensitive, delicate lad, who had recently lost his mother, and was a favourite at the Red Court Farm. He lay for a moment amidst the shivers of glass, then rose up and clasped tight hold of Sinnett, his white face and shivering frame betokening some extraordinary cause of terror. They put him in a chair, and held him there, he clinging to them. Miss Thornycroft authoritatively stopped all questions until he should be calmer. Sinnett brought him some wine, and the boy tried to sip it; but he could not keep his teeth still, and _he bit a piece out of the glass_. He looked over his shoulder at the window perpetually in ghastly fear, so one of the servants closed and barred the shutters. By degrees, he brought out that he had "seen a ghost." Ghosts were rather favourite appendages to Coastdown, as we have read. They were not less implicitly believed in by the lower classes (not to bring in others) than they used to be, so the maids screamed and drew nearer Joe. This ghost, however, was not the old ghost of the plateau; as the boy is explaining, sobbing between whiles; but--Robert Hunter's. "Nonsense!" reproved Sinnett. "Don't you be a coward, Joe, but just speak up and tell your tale sensibly. Come!" "I went for the newspaper to Captain Copp's, as sent," answered the boy, doing his best to obey. "Mrs. Copp couldn't find it, and thought the captain had took it in his pocket to the Mermaid. Coming back here to say so, I see a figure in the churchyard hiding, like, behind a tombstone. I thought it were old Parkes, a-taking the short cut over the graves to his home, and I stood and looked at him. Then, as he rose himself a bit higher, I see him out and out. It were Mr. Hunter, with his own face and his own coat on--that black and white thing." "His own coat!" "It were," groaned the lad. "I never were thinking of anybody but Parkes, but when I once saw the coat and the face, I see it were Mr. Hunter." Joe's hearers did not know what to make of this. Miss Thornycroft privately thought she must fall in a fit, too, she felt so sick and ill. "Was the face--" began one of the maids, and stopped. Remembering Miss Thornycroft's presence, she substituted another word for the one she had been about to speak. "Was the face _red?_" "No. White. It--" At this juncture there came a sharp knock at the window, as if the ghost were knocking to come in. The boy howled, the women shrieked; and the ghost knocked again.