n God's name, who you are and what you want of me?"

The answer came in a clear, distinct voice:

"I am Elizabeth Ashol. I am suffering for a wrong done to my stepson,
Gilbert, a monk of your Order. Say Mass for my soul and I shall have
rest."

Then the figure vanished.

Father Vansome naturally had no more sleep that morning. Very early,
indeed, he was summoned to his mother's bedside by her maid, and found
her as agitated as himself. From her lips he learned that she too had
been visited by the figure he had himself seen. The woman, answering to
the description of his ghostly visitor, had approached Mrs. Vansome's
bed, when she was still wide awake, with outstretched hands and
entreating eyes, but no voice had been heard.

The apparition to his mother had convinced Father Vansome that what he
had experienced was no trick of the imagination. He had, however, taken
counsel with Val, who, like himself, was of opinion that the Mass ought
to be said. He had found on returning to Ardmuir House that morning that
his mother had confided the matter to Mrs. Ashol, and had heard from her
that previous visitors had experienced similar apparitions; on further
consideration it was discovered--though Mrs. Ashol had not realized it
before--that such persons had been invariably Catholics. There was,
however, no record of the figure having spoken; this had happened for the
first time to the only Benedictine monk who had ever entered the house
since Elizabeth Ashol's death, two centuries before.

It appeared that a certain Dame Elizabeth Ashol, second wife of Gilbert
Ashol, lived in the latter part of the seventeenth century. She had one
son, Laurence, to whom his father left the estate, to the exclusion of
his eldest son, Gilbert, the offspring of the first marriage. This
youth, to his father's intense indignation, had reverted to the faith of
his ancestors; soon after his conversion he had entered a monastery on
the continent, with a view to returning, as so many of his religious
brethren were then doing, to work for the restoration of his
fellow-countrymen to the Church. It was generally thought that Dame
Elizabeth, in her ambition for the welfare of her own son, had encouraged
her husband in his religious bias, and secured the succession for
Laurence. It was held in the family that the disasters which had always
befallen the first-born of the house dated from the unjust acquisition of
the estate by this Laurence, a