So far there had been disappointment as to the ghost. Sounds had been heard
of a most satisfying grimness, during those midnight and early morning
watchings; rappings, and scrapings, and scratching on the wall, groanings
and meanings, sighings and whisperings behind the wainscote; but nothing
spectral had been seen; and Mrs. Doler had been severely reprimanded by her
patrons and patronesses for the unwarrantable conduct of a spectre which
she professed to have seen as often as she had fingers and toes.
It was the phantom of a nun--a woman of exceeding beauty, but white as the
linen which banded her cheek and brow. There was a dark story of violated
oaths, priestly sin, and the sleepless conscience of the dead, who could
not rest even in that dreadful grave where the sinner had been immured
alive, but must needs haunt the footsteps of the living, a wandering shade.
Some there were who disbelieved in the traditions of that living grave,
and who even went so far as to doubt the ghost; but the spectre had an
established repute of more than a century, was firmly believed in by all
the children and old women of the neighbourhood, and had been written about
by students of the unseen.
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