Miss Blake had previously a speaking acquaintanceship with Mr. Strange, having often met him going in and out. She sat down; and the three were chatting amicably when they were pounced in upon by little Mrs. Chaffen. Happening to call in to see her cousin, and hearing from the maid downstairs what Mrs. Jinks was then engaged upon--dressing the gentleman's hand--the nurse ran up to offer her more experienced services. She took the hand out of Mrs. Jinks's into her own, and dressed it and bound it up as well as Mr. Moore himself could have done. It was nearly over when, by a curious coincidence--curious, considering what was to come of it--the conversation turned upon _ghosts_. Upon ghosts, of all things in the world! Some noise had been heard in the house the previous night by all the inmates--which noise had not been in any way accounted for. It was like the falling down of a piece of heavy furniture. It had awoke Mr. Cattacomb; it had awoke Mrs. Jinks; it had startled Mr. Strange, who was not asleep. The history of this was being given to Miss Blake, Mr. Strange gravely asserting it could have been nothing but a ghost--and that set Mrs. Chaffen on. She proceeded to tell them with real gravity, not assumed, that she did believe a ghost, in the shape of a gentleman in dinner dress, haunted the Maze: or else that her eyes were taking to see visions. It should be mentioned that after a week's attendance on Mrs. Grey, Nurse Chaffen had been discharged. The patient was then going on quite well: and, as Mr. Moore saw that it worried her to have the nurse there--for whom she seemed to have conceived an insurmountable dislike--he took her away. The summary dismissal did not please the nurse: and she revenged herself by reporting that the Maze had a ghost in it. As a rule, people laughed at her, and thought no more about it: this afternoon her tale was to bear different fruit. She told it consecutively. How she had been quite flurried by being called out by Dr. Moore all on a sudden; how he had taken her straight off to the Maze without saying where it was she was going till she got to the gate; how she and the doctor had seen the gentleman at the top of the stairs (which she took it to be the sick lady's husband), and watched him vanish into an end room, and had never seen the least sign of him afterwards; how the servant, Mrs. Hopley, had vowed through thick and thin that no gentleman was, or had been, or could have been in the house, unbeknown to her and Hopley.