stepped along the passage, leading into the great hall, a sound
of lamentation was heard, which seemed to come from the hall itself, and
they stopped in new alarm to listen, when Emily presently distinguished
the voice of Annette, whom she found crossing the hall, with another
female servant, and so terrified by the report, which the other maids
had spread, that, believing she could be safe only where her lady was,
she was going for refuge to her apartment. Emily's endeavours to
laugh, or to argue her out of these terrors, were equally vain, and, in
compassion to her distress, she consented that she should remain in her
room during the night.

CHAPTER V

Hail, mildly-pleasing Solitude!
Companion of the wise and good--

This is the balmy breath of morn,
Just as the dew-bent rose is born.

But chief when evening scenes decay
And the faint landscape swims away,
Thine is the doubtful, soft decline,
And that best hour of musing thine.
THOMSON

Emily's injunctions to Annette to be silent on the subject of her terror
were ineffectual, and the occurrence of the preceding night spread such
alarm among the servants, who now all affirmed, that they had frequently
heard unaccountable noises in the chateau, that a report soon reached
the Count of the north side of the castle being haunted. He treated
this, at first, with ridicule, but, perceiving, that it was productive
of serious evil, in the confusion it occasioned among his household, he
forbade any person to repeat it, on pain of punishment.

The arrival of a party of his friends soon withdrew his thoughts
entirely from this subject, and his servants had now little leisure to
brood over it, except, indeed, in the evenings after supper, when they
all assembled in their hall, and related stories of ghosts, till they
feared to look round the room; started, if the echo of a closing door
murmured along the passage, and refused to go singly to any part of the
castle.

On these occasions Annette made a distinguished figure. When she told
not only of all the wonders she had witnessed, but of all that she
had imagined, in the castle of Udolpho, with the story of the strange
disappearance of Signora Laurentini, she made no trifling impression on
the mind of her attentive auditors. Her suspicions, concerning Montoni,
she would also have freely disclosed, had not Ludovico, who was now in
the service of the Count, prudently checked her loquacity, whenever it