The House by the Church-Yard by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Page A

Puddock understood it, and restored the treasure.
    The secret conference in the drawing–room was not tedious, nor indeed very secret, for anyone acquainted with the diplomatic slang in which such affairs were conducted might have learned in the lobby, or indeed in the hall, so mighty was the voice of the stranger, that there was no chance of any settlement without a meeting which was fixed to take place at twelve o’clock next day on the Fifteen Acres.

CHAPTER XI.
SOME TALK ABOUT THE HAUNTED HOUSE—BEING, AS I SUPPOSE, ONLY OLD WOMAN’S TALES.
    Old Sally always attended her young mistress while she prepared for bed—not that Lilias required help, for she had the spirit of neatness and a joyous, gentle alacrity, and only troubled the good old creature enough to prevent her thinking herself grown old and useless.
    Sally, in her quiet way, was garrulous, and she had all sorts of old–world tales of wonder and adventure, to which Lilias often went pleasantly to sleep; for there was no danger while old Sally sat knitting there by the fire, and the sound of the rector’s mounting upon his chairs, as was his wont, and taking down and putting up his books in the study beneath, though muffled and faint, gave evidence that that good and loving influence was awake and busy.
    Old Sally was telling her young mistress, who sometimes listened with a smile, and sometimes lost a good five minutes together of her gentle prattle, how the young gentleman, Mr. Mervyn, had taken that awful old haunted habitation, the Tiled House 'beyant at Ballyfermot,' and was going to stay there, and wondered no one had told him of the mysterious dangers of that desolate mansion.
    It stood by a lonely bend of the narrow road. Lilias had often looked upon the short, straight, grass–grown avenue with an awful curiosity at the old house which she had learned in childhood to fear as the abode of shadowy tenants and unearthly dangers.
    'There are people, Sally, nowadays, who call themselves free–thinkers, and don’t believe in anything—even in ghosts,' said Lilias.
    'A then the place he’s stopping in now, Miss Lily, 'ill soon cure him of free–thinking, if the half they say about it’s true,' answered Sally.
    'But I don’t say, mind, he’s a free–thinker, for I don’t know anything of Mr. Mervyn; but if he be not, he must be very brave, or very good, indeed. I know, Sally, I should be horribly afraid, indeed, to sleep in it myself,' answered Lilias, with a cosy little shudder, as the aërial image of the old house for a moment stood before her, with its peculiar malign, sacred, and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt under the melancholy old elms among the tall hemlock and nettles.
    'And now, Sally, I’m safe in bed. Stir the fire, my old darling.' For although it was the first week in May, the night was frosty. 'And tell me all about the Tiled House again, and frighten me out of my wits.'
    So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off over the well–known ground in a gentle little amble—sometimes subsiding into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up altogether—that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a mysterious nod at her young mistress in the four–poster, or lowering her voice to a sort of whisper when the crisis came.
    So she told her how when the neighbours hired the orchard that ran up to the windows at the back of the house, the dogs they kept there used to howl so wildly and wolfishly all night among the trees, and prowl under the walls of the house so dejectedly, that they were fain to open the door and let them in at last; and, indeed, small need was there for dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after night–fall. No, the burnished golden pippins that peeped through the leaves in the western rays of evening, and made the mouths of the Ballyfermot school–boys water, glowed undisturbed in the morning sunbeams,