The maiden started visibly, glancing quickly round the empty
room, but answering simply that she had seen no one. I described
him in great detail, and then, as the description grew clearer, she
turned a little pale under her pretty sunborn and said very gravely
that it must have been the ghost.
"Ghost! What ghost?"
"Oh, the village ghost," she said quietly, coming closer to my
chair with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding
in a lower voice, "He comes before a death, they say!"
It was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story
she told me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered
with the years round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure,
was an interesting and peculiar one.
The inn, she said, was originally a farmhouse, occup
