it easy for people to deceive
her. How terrible must have been the girl's misery before she could
drown herself in the sea! And there was no rest for her troubled
spirit, even in death! She was not sleeping peacefully in the little
churchyard down by the shore, where all their kinsfolk lay within sound
of the sea by night and day. There was something awful to Aunt Priscilla
in the thought of Rhoda's homeless and restless spirit wandering about
the places where she had been an innocent and a happy child.

Late on New Year's Eve Aunt Priscilla drew aside the curtain which had
hung across her window since Christmas Day, and sat in the darkness
gazing out into the field. In the house all was as silent as the grave,
and out of doors there was the hush of night. A hoar-frost had fallen,
and gave a glimmer of light, even where the shadows fell, when otherwise
it would have been utter blackness. The waning moon hung in the dark
sky, above a bank of thick and gloomy clouds. She could hear the distant
undertone of the sea, and the murmuring of the many brooks running down
the mountain slopes in the winter, for the cold was not yet sharp enough
to freeze them.

And she could hear a far-off house-dog barking, and the nearer clanking
of the chains by which the cows were fastened to their mangers, and the
loud ticking of the old clock in the kitchen below. It would very soon
be midnight. She felt the chill of the keen air, and she shivered as she
huddled her shawl closer about her; but it was not the cold that made
her lips tremble and her heart throb painfully.

She could fancy--oh, how easily!--that she saw Rhoda, as she had often
seen her, tripping along the causeway, with her bonny, merry face, and
her dancing feet. But she knew well it was only a trick her memory was
playing. The fold lay all silent and deserted beneath her watchful eyes,
with every door safely closed, and the gate at the far end locked.
Everything was precisely the same as usual.

She was almost dozing in her chair, when all at once she felt her flesh
creep, and her heart throb more violently than ever. A black form was
stirring, creeping slowly under the walls of the barn, and seemed to be
holding itself up by the empty spaces where the bricks had been left out
in the building of it. It moved so gradually that it hardly seemed to
come closer to the house; and yet it stole on nearer and nearer, a tall,
thin, creeping shadow in the midnight gloom. To Aunt Pri