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There was nothing. He could not forbear peeping down the long gallery from this point, and as he moved the light, he saw precisely the same sort of shadow, a little further down, and as he advanced the same withdrawal, and beckon.”Gammon!” said he;“itis nou’t but the candle.” And on he went, growing half-angry and half-frightened at the persistency with which this ugly shadow-a literal shadow he was sure it was-presented itself. As he drew near the point where it now appeared, it seemed to collect itself, and nearly dissolve in the central panel of an old carved cabinet which he was now approaching.

In the center panel of this is a sort of boss carved into a wolf’s head.

The light fell oddly upon this, and the fugitive shadow seemed to be breaking up, and rearranging itself oddly. The eyeball gleamed with a point of reflected light, which glittered also upon the grinning mouth, and he saw the long, sharp nose of Scroope Marston, and his fierce eve looking at him, he thought, with a steadfast meaning.

Old Cooper stood gazing upon this sight, unable to move, till he saw the face, and the figure that belonged to it, begin gradually to emerge from the wood. At the same time he heard voices approaching rapidly up a side gallery, and Cooper, with a loud “Lord a mercy on us!” turned and ran back again, pursued by a sound that seemed to shake the old house like a mighty gust of wind.

Into his master’s room burst old Cooper, half-wild with fear, and clapped the door and turned the key in a twinkling, looking as if he had been pursued by murderers.

“Did you hear it?” whispered Cooper, now standing near the dressing room door. They all listened, but not a sound from without disturbed the utter stillness of night.”God bless us! I doubt it’s my old head that’s gone crazy!” exclaimed Cooper.

He would tell them nothing but that he was himself “an old fool,” to be frightened by their talk, and that “the rattle of a window, or the dropping o’ a pin” was enough to scare him now; and so he helped himself through that night with brandy, and sat up talking by his master’s fire.

The squire recovered slowly from his brain fever, but not perfectly.

A very little thing, the doctor said, would suffice to upset him. He was not yet sufficiently strong to remove for change of scene and air, which were necessary for his complete restoration.

Cooper slept in the dressing room, and was now his only nightly at
tendant. The ways of the invalid were odd: he liked, half-sitting up in his bed, to smoke his churchwarden o’ nights, and made old Cooper smoke, for company, at the fireside. As the squire and his humble friend indulged in it, smoking is a taciturn pleasure, and it was not until the master of Gylingden had finished his third pipe that he essayed conversation, and when he did, the subject was not such as Cooper would have chosen.

“I say, old Cooper, look ill my face, and don’t be afeared to speak out,” said the squire, looking at him with a steady, cunning smile; “you know all this time, as well as I do, who’s in the house. You needn’t deny-hey?-Scroope and my father?”

“Don’t you be talking like that, Charlie,” said old Cooper, rather sternly and frightened, after a long silence, still looking in his face, which did not change.

“What’s tile good o’ shammin’, Cooper? Scroope’s took the hearin’ o’ yet right ear-you know he did. He’s looking angry. He’s nigh took my life wi’ this fever. But he’s not done wi’ me yet, and he looks awful wicked. Ye saw him-ye know ye did.”