Miss Winter had herself always felt a secret distrust of Lennox, without knowing the reason why. Perhaps, as Aaron had said, it was the contrast between his smooth, dulcet tones, and the expression in his cold, hard-set glances: any way, she had never taken cordially to Captain Lennox.
"Your wife seems but poorly to-day, Aaron," resumed Miss Winter, purposely quitting the other subject.
"She's a bigger ninny than ever," retorted Aaron, in an explosive tone. "I beg pardon ma'am; but the old woman be enough to wear one's patience out."
Dorothy Stone seemed to live in a chronic state of fear. What was it that she was afraid of, her husband would angrily ask her--and the most he could make of her trembling answers was, that she was afraid of the "ghosts." Heron Dyke had become a fearsome place, she would say: any night she might meet Katherine Keen in the passages; or, maybe, the dead Squire. Aaron, quite beside himself with wrath at all this, threatened to shake her: but the threat made no visible impression. Miss Winter would reason with her now and again; but the old woman's life had become a trouble to herself.
What little pleasure (a sadly negative one) she ever found in it, was when she recalled all her grandson's perfections, and her past love for him. To this she found sympathising listeners in the maids.
"Where was there another like him?" she would say, from the easy-chair before the fire in her own sitting-room, a huge black bow on her muslin cap. "So bold, and handsome, and high-spirited--he was fit to match with any gentleman in the land."
"And so he was, ma'am," would make answer to her Phemie or Eliza.
"When was that vision of the hearse and headless horses ever known to show its warning for the likes of you and me?" she would continue; "but it appeared for him!"
For it was generally believed that not often was that dire portent visible to mortal eye except when the scion of some great family was about to be summoned hence; thus, as Dorothy looked upon it, the vision must be regarded as a species of honour. It was for Macbeth alone that the witches worked their spells and brewed their potions; their business lay not with the rabble rout that called him captain.
But there came an hour when, pondering upon these matters, it occurred to Edward Conroy, a shrewd reasoner, that more might be in this nervous terror of Dorothy's than she allowed to meet the eye. What was it that she was afraid of? He asked himself the question. Sitting by the blazing fire in her own parlour, or in the kitchen bright with sunlight, people around her within beck and call, it could not be that she feared to see a ghost there--that poor Katherine Keen in the spirit would walk in to confront her. Yet, that Dorothy would, and did, sit there often in the day-time in unmistakable terror could not be disputed.