and, in a horrible _sauve
qui peut_, we rushed and stumbled together toward the light by Uncle
Silas's bed. But old Wyat's voice and figure reassured us.

'Milly,' I said, so soon as, pale and very faint, I reached my apartment,
'no power on earth shall ever tempt me to enter that room again after
dark.'

'Why, Maud dear, what, in Heaven's name, did you see?' said Milly, scarcely
less terrified.

'Oh, I can't; I can't; I can't, Milly. Never ask me. It is haunted. The
room is haunted _horribly_.'

'Was it Charke?' whispered Milly, looking over her shoulder, all aghast.

'No, no--don't ask me; a fiend in a worse shape.' I was relieved at last by
a long fit of weeping; and all night good Mary Quince sat by me, and Milly
slept by my side. Starting and screaming, and drugged with sal-volatile, I
got through that night of supernatural terror, and saw the blessed light of
heaven again.

Doctor Jolks, when he came to see my uncle in the morning, visited me also.
He pronounced me very hysterical, made minute enquiries respecting my hours
and diet, asked what I had had for dinner yesterday. There was something
a little comforting in his cool and confident pooh-poohing of the ghost
theory. The result was, a regimen which excluded tea, and imposed chocolate
and porter, earlier hours, and I forget all beside; and he undertook to
promise that, if I would but observe his directions, I should never see a
ghost again.

CHAPTER L

_MILLY'S FAREWELL_

A few days' time saw me much better. Doctor Jolks was so contemptuously
sturdy and positive on the point, that I began to have comfortable doubts
about the reality of my ghost; and having still a horror indescribable
of the illusion, if such it were, the room in which it appeared, and
everything concerning it, I would neither speak, nor, so far as I could,
think of it.

So, though Bartram-Haugh was gloomy as well as beautiful, and some of its
associations awful, and the solitude that reigned there sometimes almost
terrible, yet early hours, bracing exercise, and the fine air that
predominates that region, soon restored my nerves to a healthier tone.

But it seemed to me that Bartram-Haugh was to be to me a vale of tears; or
rather, in my sad pilgrimage, that valley of the shadow of death through
which poor Christian fared alone and in the dark.

One day Milly ran into the parlour, pale, with wet cheeks, and, without
saying a word, threw her arms about my neck, and bur