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 aerial
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.
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