ok this, her wedding-gown, and cut it up in this
strange fashion that you see, and laid it so in the chest; as a warning,
she told her mother. She died very soon after her return; poor Aunt
Penelope!"

She signed to Janet to lay the tattered gown back; and it seemed to the
girls as if the poor lady herself were being laid back in her coffin to
rest after her troubled life.

"Does--does she walk?" asked Peggy, in an awestruck voice.

"Walk?" repeated Mrs. Cheriton. "I don't--oh, yes! her ghost, you mean,
Peggy? No, my dear. I fancy she was too tired to think of anything but
resting. There is only one Montfort ghost that I ever heard of, and that
one is not a woman's."

"Oh, tell us! Tell us, please!" cried all three girls eagerly. "A real
ghost? How thrilling!"

"I did not say it was a real ghost, you impetuous children. I do not
believe in ghosts myself, and I never saw this one. But people used to
think that the spirit of Hugo Montfort haunted one of the rooms. He died
suddenly, in great trouble about some family papers that had been lost,
and the family tradition is that he comes back from time to time to hunt
once more through desks and drawers, in hope of finding them. He has
never done so, I believe; but then, he has never been here since I came
to Fernley. Your Uncle John is no ghost-lover, any more than I am, and I
fear poor Hugo may feel the lack of sympathy. And now," she added, "this
is positively enough of old-time gossip. I do not know when I have
talked so much, children; you make me young and frivolous once more."

"Oh," cried Peggy, who had listened open-mouthed to the last tale; "but
just tell us what he looks like, when any one does see him. I have
wanted all my life to be where there was a ghost. Is he--is he in
white?"

"Oh, dear, no! Hugo Montfort is no hobgoblin ghost in a white sheet,
with a pumpkin head! He was a very elegant gentleman in his time, and I
believe his favorite wear is black velvet. By the way, his portrait is
in the long gallery upstairs. Have you been there, my dears? There are
some curious old portraits. And there is the garret; you have surely
visited the garret?"

But the girls had not, they confessed. There had been so much to do, the
days had gone so rapidly. Margaret alone realised, and she perhaps for
the first time, how little they had really seen of the house itself.
There was so much to see out of doors, and when indoors she was always
drawn irresistibly to the