to be said. He had found on returning to Ardmuir House that morning that
his mother had confided the matter to Mrs. Ashol, and had heard from her
that previous visitors had experienced similar apparitions; on further
consideration it was discovered--though Mrs. Ashol had not realized it
before--that such persons had been invariably Catholics. There was,
however, no record of the figure having spoken; this had happened for the
first time to the only Benedictine monk who had ever entered the house
since Elizabeth Ashol's death, two centuries before.

It appeared that a certain Dame Elizabeth Ashol, second wife of Gilbert
Ashol, lived in the latter part of the seventeenth century. She had one
son, Laurence, to whom his father left the estate, to the exclusion of
his eldest son, Gilbert, the offspring of the first marriage. This
youth, to his father's intense indignation, had reverted to the faith of
his ancestors; soon after his conversion he had entered a monastery on
the continent, with a view to returning, as so many of his religious
brethren were then doing, to work for the restoration of his
fellow-countrymen to the Church. It was generally thought that Dame
Elizabeth, in her ambition for the welfare of her own son, had encouraged
her husband in his religious bias, and secured the succession for
Laurence. It was held in the family that the disasters which had always
befallen the first-born of the house dated from the unjust acquisition of
the estate by this Laurence, and the entire disinheriting of Gilbert; it
was from a kind of superstitious dread attaching to the name that no
Ashol for a long term of years had ever been baptized Laurence.

Father Vansome said the required Mass next morning, and his mother drove
over to assist at it. Her prayers and mine were thus united with the
supreme Sacrifice on behalf of the soul so greatly in need.