"They found her lying on the grass outside. As she could no longer sustain herself on a horse, they put her into the coach, gave the reins to her devoted lackey, and themselves rode off on horseback. One man, the fellow who had driven them to that place, said that the clock struck twelve from the chapel tower as the coach turned away and began its rapid journey home. This may and may not be so. We only know that its apparition always enters Lost Man's Lane a few minutes before one, which is the very hour at which the real coach came back and stopped before Mr. Knollys' gate. And now for the worst, Miss Butterworth. When the old gentleman went down to greet the runaways, he found the lackey on the box and his daughter sitting all alone in the coach. But the soil on the brocaded folds of her white dress was no longer that of mud only. She had stabbed herself to the heart with a bodkin she wore in her hair, and it was a corpse which the faithful negro had been driving down the highway that night."
I am not a sentimental woman, but this story as thus told gave me a thrill I do not know as I really regret experiencing.
"What was this unhappy mother's name?" I asked.
"Lucetta," was the unexpected and none too reassuring answer.
This name once mentioned called for more gossip, but of a somewhat different nature.
"The Lucetta of to-day is not like her ancient namesake," observed Mrs. Carter. "She may have the heart to love, but she is not capable of showing that love by any act of daring."
"I don't know about that," I replied, astonished that I felt willing to enter into a discussion with this woman on the very subject I had just shrunk from talking over with the locksmith. "Girls as frail and nervous as she is, sometimes astonish one at a pinch. I do not think Lucetta lacks daring."
"You don't know her. Why, I have seen her jump at the sight of a spider, and heaven knows that they are common enough among the decaying walls in which she lives. A puny chit, Miss Butterworth; pretty enough, but weak. The very kind to draw lovers, but not to hold them. Yet every one pities her, her smile is so heart-broken."
"With ghosts to trouble her and a lover to bemoan, she has surely some excuse for that," said I.