"I know they have. But they were usurpers here for the time. Better--as I believe--that my father had shut it up: better, far better, that he had never left it! He knew it also: and it preyed upon him on his death-bed." "Oh, Janet! the ill may not come in our time!" "It may not. I am anxious to believe it may not, in defiance of the unalterable conviction that has seated itself within me. Let it pass, Maria; talking of it will not avert it: indeed, I do not know how I came to be betrayed into speaking of it openly." "But you have not told me about the sounds in the passages?" urged Maria, as Janet rose from her dusty seat. "There is nothing more to tell. Peculiar sounds, as if caused by the wind, are heard. Moaning, sighing, rushing--the passages at times seem alive with them. It is said to come as a reminder to the Godolphins of a worse sound that will sometime be heard, when Ashlydyat shall be passing away from them." "But you don't believe that?" uttered Maria. "Child, I can scarcely tell you what I believe," was Janet's answer. "I can only pray that the one-half of what my heart prompts me to fear, may never take place in reality. That the noise does come, and without any apparent cause, is not a matter of belief, or disbelief: it is a fact, patent to all who have inhabited Ashlydyat. The Verralls can tell you so: they have had their rest broken by it." "And it is not caused by the wind?" Janet shook her head in dissent. "It has come on the calmest and stillest night, when there has not been a breath of air to move the leaves of the ash-trees." Bessy turned from her pastime of watching Charlotte Pain: she had taken little part in the conversation. "I wonder at you, Janet. You will be setting Maria against Ashlydyat. She will be frightened to come into it, should it lapse to George." Maria looked at her with a smile. "I should have no fear with him, superstitious or otherwise. If George took me to live in the catacombs, I could be brave with him." Ever the same blind faith; the unchanged love for her husband. Better, far better, that it should be so! "For my part, I am content to take life and its good as I find it, and not waste my time in unprofitable dreams," was the practical remark of Bessy. "If any ill is to come, it must come; but there's no need to look out for it beforehand." "There must be dreamers and there must be workers," answered Janet, picking her way down the winding stairs. "We were not all born into the world with minds similarly constituted, or to fulfil the same parts in life." The day passed on. Thomas Godolphin came home in the evening to dinner, and said George had not returned. Maria wondered. It grew later. Margery went home with Meta: who thought she was very hardly used at having to go home before her mamma.