“I’m sure I shan’t.”
“What’s to do here?” asked Tom Coney, putting in his head.
“Mackintosh has seen a ghost.”
“Seen a ghost!” cried Tom, beginning to grin.
Mackintosh, trembling yet, entered afresh on the recital, rather improving it by borrowing Tod’s mocking suggestion. “A dead man in his shroud come out walking from his grave in the churchyard—which he feared might be Ferrar, lying on the edge on’t, just beyond consecrated ground. I never could abear to go by the spot where he was put in, and never a prayer said over him, Mr. Tom!”
But, in spite of the solemnity of the subject, touching Ferrar, Tom Coney could only have his laugh out. The servants came in from their fruitless search of the dairy and cellars, and started to see the state of Mackintosh.
“Give him a cup of warm ale, Molly,” was Tod’s command. And we left them gathered round the man, listening to his tale with open mouths.
From the fact that Nettie Trewin was certainly not in the house, one only deduction could be drawn—that the timid child had run home to her mother. Bare-headed, bare-necked, bare-armed, she had gone through the snow; and, as Miss Timmens expressed it, might just have caught her death.
“Senseless little idiot!” exclaimed Miss Timmens in a passion. “Sarah Trewin is sure to blame me; she’ll say I might have taken better care of her.”
But one of the elder girls, named Emma Stone, whose recollection only appeared to come to her when digesting her supper, spoke up at this juncture, and declared that long after “Puss-in-the-corner” was over, and also “Oranges and Lemons,” which had succeeded it, she had seen and spoken to Nettie Trewin. Her account was, that in crossing the passage leading from the store-room, she saw Nettie “scrouged against the wall, half-way down the passage, like anybody afeared of being seen.”