The captain, shaking off the horrible influence of dread, sprang to his feet.
He was about to advance to the horrid thing, but the blue light suddenly disappeared, the figure glided out of the stream of light flowing from the lantern, and all the captain saw was the fiery eyes and the dull gleam of the white, ghostly drapery.
"Ghost or no ghost," he hissed, "you shall not escape me!" and he sprang forward.
But before he could clutch the apparition it drew back with a gliding motion, and seemed to vanish through the wall.
With a bewildered and daunted air the captain glared around.
The two human beings were once more alone.
White and trembling, the guilty schemer turned to the window and grasped Jem's arm.
"Come," he said, hoarsely. "We've been dreaming."
Without a word, and trembling in every limb, the pair descended one after the other, the captain remaining last, and shudderingly expecting to feel the ghostly hand of bone upon his throat.
But the vision did not appear again, and, exhausted with exertion and horror, the two men stood in their own room staring at each other's white faces.
Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour at which he had retired to rest, the captain was up early in the morning and, with his cheroot in his mouth, strolling round the Park.
Whistling his favorite air, he leaped the old fence which divided the neatly kept rosary of the modern garden from the cold, waste little courtyard of the ruined chapel, and with cautious feet and watchful eyes, entered the broken and crumbling cloisters in the search for more evidence of the apparition which had so startled him on the preceding evening.
Next the cloisters was the chapel, or what remained of it.
The captain stumbled to the middle of it and looked up through its roofless height to the sky above.
In the center of the façade was the large oriel window.
A portion of the old organ-loft clung to it, and was lost on either side in a mass of ruined, moss-covered stone, which was the remains of a flight of stone steps.
"No one but a ghost," muttered the captain, "could walk along there."
With an emphatic exclamation he turned his attention to the wall next the house.
He fancied that he could distinguish the dark outline of a door, but, by the aid of a small opera-glass which he had brought with him, he made out that the ivy had grown over it to such an extent that egress or exit by it was impossible.