"Be it as you please," said Sibyl. "Meanwhile, if you like to sit down here
and listen to me, I will tell you a story that happens to come into my
mind just now,--I cannot tell why. It is a legend of an old hall that I
know well, and have known from my childhood, in one of the northern
counties of England, where I was born. Would you like to hear it, Rose?"

"Yes, of all things," said she. "I like all stories of hall and cottage in
the old country, though now we must not call it our country any more."

Sibyl looked at Septimius, as if to inquire whether he, too, chose to
listen to her story, and he made answer:--

"Yes, I shall like to hear the legend, if it is a genuine one that has been
adopted into the popular belief, and came down in chimney-corners with the
smoke and soot that gathers there; and incrusted over with humanity, by
passing from one homely mind to another. Then, such stories get to be
true, in a certain sense, and indeed in that sense may be called true
throughout, for the very nucleus, the fiction in them, seems to have come
out of the heart of man in a way that cannot be imitated of malice
aforethought. Nobody can make a tradition; it takes a century to make
it."

"I know not whether this legend has the character you mean," said Sibyl,
"but it has lived much more than a century; and here it is.

* * * * *

"On the threshold of one of the doors of ---- Hall there is a bloody
footstep impressed into the doorstep, and ruddy as if the bloody foot had
just trodden there; and it is averred that, on a certain night of the