her face and covered her eyes in nervous terror. Alice had regained
the mastery of her animal and now drew up alongside the other. She
looked, and the sharp catching of her breath told of what she saw.
Suddenly she gripped Prudence's arm and drew the girl's hand from
before her face.

"Keep quiet, Prue," she whispered. "What is this place?"

"The Owl Hoot graveyard. This is the Haunted Hill."

"And those?" Alice was pointing fearfully towards the clearing.

"Are----Oh, come away, I can't stand it."

But neither girl made a move to go. Their eyes were fixed in a gaze of
burning fascination upon the scene before them. Dark, almost black,
the surrounding woods threw up in relief the clearing lit by the
stars. But even so the scene was indistinct and uncertain. A low
broken fence surrounded a small patch of ground, in the middle of
which stood a ruined log-hut. Round the centre were scattered
half-a-dozen or more tumbled wooden crosses, planted each in the
centre of an elongated mound of earth. Here and there a slab of stone
marked the grave of some dead-and-gone resident of Owl Hoot, and a few
shrubs had sprung up as though to further indicate these obscure
monuments. But it was not these things which had filled the spectators
with such horror. It was the crowd of silent flitting figures that
seemed to come from out of one of the stone-marked graves, and pass,
in regular procession, in amongst the ruins of the log-hut, and there
disappear. To the girls' distorted fancy they seemed to be shrouded
human forms. Their faces were hidden by reason of their heads being
bent forward under the pressure of some strange burden which rested on
their shoulders. Forty of these gruesome phantoms rose from out of the
ground and passed before their wildly-staring eyes and disappeared
amidst the ruins. Not a sound was made by their swift-treading feet.
They seemed to float over the ground. Then all became still again.
Nothing moved, nor was there even the rustle of a leaf upon the boughs
above. The stars twinkled brightly, and the calm of the night was
undisturbed. Alice's grip fell from her companion's arm. Her horse
reared and plunged, then, taking the bit between its teeth, it set off
down the hill in the direction of Iredale's house. The light which had
burned in one of the windows had suddenly gone out, and there was
nothing now to indicate the way, but the mare made no mistake.
Prudence gave her horse its head and followed in h