"You can go back to bed, Parker. I'll take a turn round the house myself. Good-night."
"Good-night, sir; thank you, sir."
The next day at noon the cook and the first and second housemaids gave three days' notice. It was thought advisable not to tell Eleanor, and, after a consultation with Hiram, Betty engaged a new cook and one housemaid by telephone from a London agency.
That afternoon the cook confided to the laundress, in a frightened whisper, that she had been told in strict secrecy by Parker, who got it from Gibson, Mrs. Baxter's maid, that Mrs. Baxter had a white mark on her forehead she would carry to her grave, made by the icy fingers of the Gray Lady. The story spread among the servants like an epidemic.
As night came on the last remnant of courage accumulated in the daylight oozed away, the frightened females refused to be separated and passed the night on sofas and chairs in the servants' parlor.
As for Mrs. Baxter, the shock she had received was no mean tribute to Hester's histrionic power. Nothing could remove from Eleanor's mind the conviction that she had actually beheld the supernatural shape of Lady Ysobel Ippynge, dead and buried these hundreds of years.
Mingled with her physical distress, there was a childish sense of outrage in that, having survived a unique and painful adventure, she should, by its belittlement, be robbed of the distinction she felt to be her due.
"If," reasoned the aggrieved lady, "the shock to my nerves isn't proof enough that I have really seen a ghost, then it is because of my great self-control; and all the thanks you get for self-control is to be told that you have nothing the matter with you."
Very well, she would cease to cast this pearl of self-control before the swine of unsympathy. She would let them know how really ill she was. And so, aggravated by the well-meant but irritating optimism of her family, Eleanor Baxter's "nerves" grew daily worse until, on the afternoon of her third day in bed, Hiram telephoned to a nerve specialist in London, who took the first train for Ippingford and informed the suffering lady, after a careful examination, that she was on the verge of complete nervous prostration. This was the first sensible remark Eleanor had heard for a week.
"Don't give yourself a moment's worry, Mr. Baxter," said the doctor, as Hiram put him aboard the train. "All your wife really needs is a change of air. Better take her down to Brighton."