usiness brought them to the attic looked in the corners warily, while
they stayed, but the servants did not like to go there alone. They
said the room smelt strangely of earth, and that the air struck with
an insidious chill: and a gamekeeper being in full view of the attic
window one night declared that from the window came a faint moving
glow, and that a wavering shadow moved in the room.

It was in this cold attic the dog took up his abode. He followed a
servant up there one morning, and broke out into an excited whimpering
when he came near the chest. After a while of sniffing and rubbing
against it he established himself upon it with his nose on his paws.
Afterwards he refused to leave it. Finally the servants gave up the
attempt to coax him back into the world, and with a compunctious pity
they spread an old rug for him on the chest, and fed him faithfully
every day. The master never inquired for him: he was glad to have the
brute out of his sight: the mistress heard of the fancy which
possessed him, and said nothing: she had given up thinking to win him
over. So he grew quite old and grizzled, and half blind as summers and
winters passed by. It grew a superstition with the servants to take
care of him, and with them on their daily visits he was so
affectionate and caressing as to recall the days in which some of them
remembered him when his mistress lived, and he was a happy dog, as
good at fighting and rat-hunting and weasel-catching as any dog in the
Island.

But every night as twelve o'clock struck the dog came down the attic
stairs. He was suddenly alert and cheerful, and trotted by an
invisible gown. Some said you could hear the faint rustle of silk
lapping from stair to stair, and the dog would sometimes bark sharply
as in his days of puppyhood, and leap up to lick a hand of air. The
servants would shut their doors as they heard the patter of the dog's
feet coming, and his sudden bark. They were thrilled with a
superstitious awe, but they were not afraid the ghost would harm them.
They remembered how just, how gentle, how pure the dead woman had
been. They whispered that she might well be dreeing this purgatory of
returning to her dispossessed house for another's sake, not her own.
Husband and wife were nearly always in their own room when she
passed. She went everywhere looking to the fastenings of the house,
trying every door and window as she had done in the old days, when her
husband declared the old