So the family came to acquiesce in this mysterious light. No harm
accompanied it. Old Laurence, as he smoked his lonely pipe in the
grass-grown courtyard, would cast a disturbed glance at it, as it softly
glowed out through the darking aperture, and mutter a prayer or an oath.
But he had given over the chase as a hopeless business. And Peggy
Sullivan, the old dame of all work, when, by chance, for she never
willingly looked toward the haunted quarter, she caught the faint
reflection of its dull effulgence with the corner of her eye, would sign
herself with the cross or fumble at her beads, and deeper furrows would
gather in her forehead, and her face grow ashen and perturbed. And this
was not mended by the levity with which the young ladies, with whom the
spectre had lost his influence, familiarity, as usual, breeding
contempt, had come to talk, and even to jest, about it.



CHAPTER V


The Man with the Claret Mark

But as the former excitement flagged, old Peggy Sullivan produced a new
one; for she solemnly avowed that she had seen a thin-faced man, with an
ugly red mark all over the side of his cheek, looking out of the same
window, just at sunset, before the young ladies returned from their
evening walk.

This sounded in their ears like an old woman's dream, but still it was
an excitement, jocular in the morning, and just, perhaps, a little
fearful as night overspread the vast and desolate building, but still,