She paused for breath.
"Here it is," said Laura, finding the bottle, and bringing it. "What's wrong?"
"Oh, my dear, such an adventure! There's an old man fainted in the kitchen. He came to the back door to ask for a light for his lantern. Mrs. Denton says he was shaking all over when she first saw him, and as white as her apron. He told her he'd seen the ghost! 'I've often heard tell o' the Bannisdale Lady,' he said, 'an now I've seen her!' She asked him to sit down a minute to rest himself, and he fainted straight away. He's that old Scarsbrook, you know, whose wife does our washing. They live in that cottage by the weir, the other end of the park. I must go! Mrs. Denton's giving him some brandy—and Alan's gone down. Isn't it an extraordinary thing?"
"Very," said Laura, accompanying her stepmother along the passage. "What did he see?"
She paused, laying a restraining hand on Augustina's arm—cudgelling her brains the while. Yes! she could remember now a few contemptuous remarks of Mr. Helbeck to Father Leadham on the subject of a ghost story that had sprung up during the Squire's memory in connection with the park and the house—a quite modern story, according to Helbeck, turning on the common motive of a gypsy woman and her curse, started some forty years before this date, with a local success not a little offensive, apparently, to the owner of Bannisdale.
"What did he see?" repeated the girl. "Don't hurry, Augustina; you know the doctor told you not. Shall I take the sal volatile?"
"Oh, no!—they want me." In any matter of doctoring small or great, Augustina had the happiest sense of her own importance. "I don't know what he saw exactly. It was a lady, he says—he knew it was, by the hat and the walk. She was all in black—with 'a Dolly Varden hat'—fancy the old fellow!—that hid her face—and a little white hand, that shot out sparks as he came up to her! Did you ever hear such, a tale? Now, Laura, I'm all right. Let me go. Come when you like."
Augustina hurried off; Laura was left standing pensive in the passage.
"H'm, that's unlucky," she said to herself.
Then she looked down at her right hand. An old-fashioned diamond ring with a large centre stone, which had been her mother's, shone on the third finger. With an involuntary smile, she drew off the ring, and went back to her room.