ittle by little, finding no other explanation possible, Mrs. Whitelaw
grew to believe quite firmly in the supernatural nature of that
unforgotten cry. She remembered the unexplainable footstep which she had
heard in the padlocked room in the early dusk of that new-year's-day,
when Mrs. Tadman and she explored the old house; and she associated these
two sounds in her mind as of a like ghostly character. From this time
forward she shrank with a nervous terror from that darksome passage
leading to the padlocked door at the end of the house. She had never any
occasion to go in this direction. The rooms in this wing were low, dark,
and small, and had been unused for years. It was scarcely any wonder if
rats had congregated behind the worm-eaten wainscot, to scare nervous
listeners with their weird scratchings and scramblings. But no one could
convince Ellen Whitelaw that the sounds she had heard on new-year's-day
were produced by anything so earthly as a rat. With that willingness to
believe in a romantic impossibility, rather than in a commonplace
improbability so natural to the human mind, she was more ready to
conceive the existence of a ghost than that her own sense of hearing
might have been less powerful than her fancy. About the footsteps she
was quite as positive as she was about the scream; and in the last
instance she had the evidence of Mrs. Tadman's senses to support her.

She was surprised to find one day, when the household drudge, Martha
Holden, had been cleaning the passage and rooms in that deserted wing--a
task very seldom performed--that the girl had the same aversion to that
part of the house which she felt herself, but of which she had never
spoken in the presence of the servants.

"If it wasn't for Mrs. Tadman driving and worrying after me all the time
I'm at work, I don't think I could stay there, mum," Martha told her
mistress. "It isn't often I like to be fidgetted and followed; but
anything's better than being alone in that unked place."

"It's rather dark and dreary, certainly, Martha," Ellen answered with an
admirable assumption of indifference; "but, as we haven't any of us got
to live there, that doesn't much matter."

"It isn't that, mum. I wouldn't mind the darkness and the dreariness--and
I'm sure such a place for spiders I never did see in my life; there was
one as I took down with my broom to-day, and scrunched, as big as a small
crab--but it's worse than, that: the place is haunted."