ghost. Oh, please, don't be angry. I thought
I heard this door open, but it is locked. Oh! perhaps it is very silly,
but I am so frightened, Miss Vivian."

"Go back to bed," said Mary; "there is no--ghost. I am going to sit up
and write some--letters. You will see my light under the door."

"Oh, thank you," cried the girl.

Mary remembered what a consolation and strength in all wakefulness had
been the glimmer of the light under her godmother's door. She smiled to
think that she herself, so desolate as she was, was able to afford this
innocent comfort to another girl, and then sat down and wept quietly,
feeling her solitude and the chill about her, and the dark and the
silence. The moon had gone behind a cloud. There seemed no light but her
small miserable candle in earth and heaven. And yet that poor little
speck of light kept up the heart of another,--which made her smile again
in the middle of her tears. And by-and-by the commotion in her head and
heart calmed down, and she too fell asleep.

Next day she heard all the floating legends that were beginning to rise
in the house. They all arose from Connie's questions about the old lady
whom she had seen going up-stairs before her, the first evening after the
new family's arrival. It was in the presence of the doctor,--who had come
to see the child, and whose surprise at finding Mary there was almost
ludicrous,--that she heard the story, though much against his will.

"There can be no need for troubling Miss Vivian about it," he said, in a
tone which was almost rude. But Mrs. Turner was not sensitive.

"When Miss Vivian has just come like a dear, to help us with Connie!" the
good woman cried. "Of course she must hear it, doctor, for otherwise, how
could she know what to do?"

"Is it true that you have come here--_here?_ to help--Good heavens, Miss
Mary, _here?_"

"Why not here?" Mary said, smiling as but she could. "I am Connie's
governess, doctor."

He burst out into that suppressed roar which serves a man instead of
tears, and jumped up from his seat, clenching his fist. The clenched fist
was to the intention of the dead woman whose fault this was; and if it
had ever entered the doctor's mind, as his mother supposed, to marry this
forlorn child, and thus bestow a home upon her whether she would or no,
no doubt he would now have attempted to carry out that plan. But as no
such thing had occurred to him, the doctor only showed his sense of the
intolerable by lo