“All right,” agreed John. “I’m not a bit keen for carrying wood. Be sure you bring enough, though; we want a rattling big signal, you know. Now Mrs. Hildreth, let me show you the chapel.”
It was a delightful go-as-you-please picnic. Babe went wading in a pool after sea-anemones. Betty lay on a sunny slope dreaming of all the good times she had been having and was going to have all summer. Madeline and Mr. Dwight sat on the parapet and quarreled amicably over the right way to “lay” a signal-fire. Babbie and John conducted Mrs. Hildreth over the castle domain, and when she was tired they decorated the tea-table—a slab of rock on a sunny slope by the sea—with sprays of white heather, which is supposed always to bring good luck to those who wear it. After tea they all sat together watching the sunset, while Madeline told them a quaint folk-tale that an old grannie at the farmhouse had told her, all about ghosts and fairies and gnomes who lived on the islands in the firth.
“She wouldn’t answer when we asked her about a ghost for this castle,” Madeline added solemnly. “She just shook her head and muttered something about ‘trailing white robes.’ Just then her daughter came in with the wood, and the old woman shut up like a clam. The daughter thinks Gaelic and ghosts are all rubbish.” Madeline stood up. “It must be lovely on the parapet now.”
“It’s lovely here,” said Babe dreamily, and the party broke up again.
So it happened that Babe, who was the last to leave the shadowy beech-wood, was alone down by the little chapel when she saw the ghost. It was quite across the wood by the wall, when she first noticed it, and in the dusk she thought of course it was Babbie, who was wearing a white serge suit and a big white hat.
“Aren’t you coming to watch the moon rise with the others?” Babe called to her. But the figure didn’t answer, only came slowly nearer, groping its way uncertainly among the tree trunks. Presently Babe noticed that the white dress it wore hung in long, loose folds around it, quite differently from Babbie’s suit, that it was much taller than she, and that it carried something dark in one outstretched hand.
“It’s a trick of the others. They know I’m here alone, and they’ve sent Madeline down to scare me,” Babe reflected indignantly.
“I know you now, Miss Madeline Ghost,” she called across to the figure, “so you may as well take off that white shawl of Mrs. Hildreth’s and come with me to the parapet to see the moon rise.”
The ghostly figure was quite near now, but if it was Madeline it had no intention of letting Babe know it. It came on silently to within a few paces of where she stood waiting, and then suddenly and without warning a pitiful little moaning cry broke the stillness of the wood,—a sound like the stifled, smothered sobbing of some one in terrible anguish.
Babe listened for a minute to the gruesome moaning. Then, “Oh, I say, that’s too much,” she protested indignantly. “You’re giving me the creeps, Madeline Ayres, honestly you are. Please stop.” There was real terror in Babe’s appeal, but the ghost paid no heed. The moaning went on softly, incessantly, just as before.