“The Appearance said, ‘Follow me,’ and Mrs. Claughton, taking the bedroom candle, rose and followed out on to the landing, and so into the adjacent drawing-room.  She cannot remember opening the door, which the housemaid had locked outside, and she owns that this passage is dreamlike in her memory.  Seeing that her candle was flickering out, she substituted for it a pink one taken from a chiffonier.  The figure walked nearly to the window, turned three-quarters round, said ‘To-morrow!’ and was no more seen.  Mrs. Claughton went back to her room, where her eldest child asked:—­

“‘Who is the lady in white?’

“‘Only me, mother, go to sleep,’ she thinks she answered.  After lying awake for two hours, with gas burning, she fell asleep.  The pink candle from the drawing-room chiffonier was in her candlestick in the morning.

“After hearing the lady’s narrative I told her to try change of air, which she declined as cowardly.  So, as she would stay on at Mr. Buckley’s, I suggested that an electric alarm communicating with Miss Buckley’s room should be rigged up, and this was done.”

Here the doctor paused, and as the events had happened within the week, we felt that we were at last on the track of a recent ghost.

“Next morning, about one, the Buckleys were aroused by a tremendous peal of the alarm; Mrs. Claughton they found in a faint.  Next morning {179} she consulted me as to the whereabouts of a certain place, let me call it ‘Meresby’.  I suggested the use of a postal directory; we found Meresby, a place extremely unknown to fame, in an agricultural district about five hours from London in the opposite direction from Rapingham.  To this place Mrs. Claughton said she must go, in the interest and by the order of certain ghosts, whom she saw on Monday night, and whose injunctions she had taken down in a note-book.  She has left Rapingham for London, and there,” said the doctor, “my story ends for the present.”

We expected it to end for good and all, but in the course of the week came a communication to the doctor in writing from Mrs. Claughton’s governess.  This lady, on Mrs. Claughton’s arrival at her London house (Friday, 13th October), passed a night perturbed by sounds of weeping, “loud moans,” and “a very odd noise overhead, like some electric battery gone wrong,” in fact, much like the “warning” of a jack running down, which Old Jeffrey used to give at the Wesley’s house in Epworth.  There were also heavy footsteps and thuds, as of moving weighty bodies.  So far the governess.

This curious communication I read at Rapingham on Saturday, 14th October, or Sunday, 15th October.  On Monday I went to town.  In the course of the week I received a letter from my kinsman in Rapingham, saying that Mrs. Claughton had written to Dr. Ferrier, telling him that she had gone to Meresby on Saturday; had accomplished the bidding of the ghosts, and had lodged with one Joseph Wright, the parish clerk.