"Charlotte!"
"I know you strong men ridicule such things," said poor Madame Guise, meekly. "Anthony would have laughed just as you do. It's true, though. The Friar's Keep is haunted by a dead monk: he appears dressed in his cowl and grey habit, the same that he used to wear in life. He passes the window sometimes with a lamp in his hand."
"Since when has this revenant taken to appear?" inquired George North, after a short period of reflection. "Since Anthony's disappearance?"
"Oh, for a long, long while before it. I believe the monk died something like two hundred years ago. Why? Were you thinking, George, that it might be the revenant of poor Anthony?"
Mr. George North drew in his disbelieving lips. At a moment like the present he would not increase her pain by showing his mockery of revenants.
"What I was thinking was this, Charlotte. Whether, if poor Anthony be really no more, his destroyers may have cause to wish the Friar's Keep to remain unexplored, lest traces of him might be found, and so have improvised a revenant, as you call it, to scare people away."
"The revenant has haunted the place for years and years, George. It has been often seen."
"Then that puts an end to my theory."
"I might have had courage to search the Keep by day for the dead, as we all believe, do not come abroad then--but that I have not dared to risk being seen there," resumed Madame Guise. "Were I to be seen going into the Friar's Keep, a place that every one shuns, it might be suspected that I had a motive, and Mr. Castlemaine would question me. Besides, my young pupil is mostly with me by day: it is only in the evening that I have unquestioned liberty."
"I wonder you reconciled yourself to go into the house as governess, Charlotte."