is sixteen, you say?"

"Next October. And a firm believer in our ghost, Mr. Deland."

"Then you have a ghost and all complete?"

"Of course. Hasn't Mr. Fairnish of the Three Fishers told you the story
yet? He is usually to be relied upon to impart every bit of village
gossip within the first five minutes of one's acquaintance!"

Cleek threw back his head and laughed. They had entered a long,
low-ceilinged room, panelled in Spanish leather, with casement windows
which gave upon a little walled-in enclosure surrounded by flowering
shrubs and white-starred syringa-bushes that sent their pungent odour
upon the air in one long waft of perfume.

"He's told me a good deal, it is true, but----What a delightful room! A
library, I take it? And what a curious old instrument that is! I haven't
seen a spinning wheel like that since I was in Wales and one stood in
the corner of the room where I slept at the village inn. A sort of
heirloom, I suppose?"

She nodded, and Cleek crossed over to the thing to examine it, touching
a part here and a part there with reverent fingers.

"Yes, I suppose you _would_ call it that," she responded, crossing over
to him and looking down at the thing in question. "Though, really, why
Father has it here I cannot imagine. Its history is certainly not a
credit to the line. For it belonged to the very girl I was going to tell
you about. It belonged to the Family Ghost. Here is the story. The
villagers believe it to this day, and couldn't be persuaded to enter the
Castle grounds at night upon any pretext whatever. But of course the
educated folk don't. Early in the sixteenth century a wild head of the
Macduggan clan abducted a young--and I imagine beautiful--peasant-girl
when she was sitting at her wheel, spinning, and ran away with
her--wheel and all--and brought her here, so legend says, to this very
room. The girl, whose name, I believe, was Dhurea, or something like
that, stabbed herself with the sharp-pointed spindle of the wheel, and
in doing so laid a curse upon the Macduggan clan. She--she was going to
have a child, Mr. Deland, and as she was dying, she swore that in every
generation a Duggan should die a violent death, and that the sound of
her spinning wheel should predict the moment when death was near."

"Oho!" said Cleek, in two different tones. "That differs a good deal
from the story Mr. Fairnish tells. There was a child, I understood, and
this child was stolen by the grandparents. Th