'av you been learning, Maud, my dear cheaile--music,
French, German, eh?'

'Yes, a little; and I had just begun the use of the globes when my
governess went away.'

I nodded towards the globes, which stood near her, as I said this.

'Oh! yes--the globes;' and she spun one of them with her great hand. 'Je
vous expliquerai tout cela a fond.'

Madame de la Rougierre, I found, was always quite ready to explain
everything 'a fond;' but somehow her 'explications,' as she termed them,
were not very intelligible, and when pressed her temper woke up; so that I
preferred, after a while, accepting the expositions just as they came.

Madame was on an unusually large scale, a circumstance which made some of
her traits more startling, and altogether rendered her, in her strange way,
more awful in the eyes of a nervous _child,_ I may say, such as I was. She
used to look at me for a long time sometimes, with the peculiar smile
I have mentioned, and a great finger upon her lip, like the Eleusinian
priestess on the vase.

She would sit, too, sometimes for an hour together, looking into the fire
or out of the window, plainly seeing nothing, and with an odd, fixed look
of something like triumph--very nearly a smile--on her cunning face.

She was by no means a pleasant _gouvernante_ for a nervous girl of my
years. Sometimes she had accesses of a sort of hilarity which frightened me
still more than her graver moods, and I will describe these by-and-by.

CHAPTER V

_SIGHTS AND NOISES_

There is not an old house in England of which the servants and young people
who live in it do not cherish some traditions of the ghostly. Knowl has its
shadows, noises, and marvellous records. Rachel Ruthyn, the beauty of Queen
Anne's time, who died of grief for the handsome Colonel Norbrooke, who
was killed in the Low Countries, walks the house by night, in crisp and
sounding silks. She is not seen, only heard. The tapping of her high-heeled
shoes, the sweep and rustle of her brocades, her sighs as she pauses in the
galleries, near the bed-room doors; and sometimes, on stormy nights, her
sobs.

There is, beside, the 'link-man', a lank, dark-faced, black-haired man, in
a sable suit, with a link or torch in his hand. It usually only smoulders,
with a deep red glow, as he visits his beat. The library is one of the
rooms he sees to. Unlike 'Lady Rachel,' as the maids called her, he is seen
only, never heard. His steps fall noiseless as shadows