"'Oh!' said Alexander, 'I know you always fall in love with every bride you come across; and often even other people's sweethearts are to be found set up in that inner sanctuary which you have established in your imagination.'
"'He loves with them that love,' said Severin; 'that's why I like him so much.'
"I shall set my aunt at him,' said Alexander, laughing, 'and see if that will rid me of a species of haunting which is becoming rather a nuisance to me. You are looking at me with questioning glances, are you?--very well then; I'll make a clean breast of it. The old-maid nature is traceable in me in this further respect, that I feel a perfectly unendurable terror of ghosts, and go on like some little child whom its nurse has frightened with a bogy. What happens is no less than this: that often in broad daylight, and particularly about mid-day, when I'm looking into the chests and boxes, I suddenly seem to catch a glimpse of my aunt's peaky nose close beside me, and of her long, lean fingers poking in among the clothes and linen, and rummaging among them. If I take down a teacup, or a saucepan off the wall, to look at them with a feeling of satisfaction, all the rest rattle, and I expect to see a ghostly hand offering me another; then I throw the things down, and run to the front-room without looking over my shoulder. There I sing or whistle out of the open window into the street, at which Mistress Anne is greatly scandalized: and that the aunt "walks" every night at twelve o'clock is a positive and undoubted fact.'
"Marzell laughed heartily at this. Severin remained grave, and said, 'Let us hear all about that; it'll probably turn out to be some trick or other. Fancy a fellow with your enlightened, advanced views, turning spirit-seer!'
"'Well, Severin,' said Alexander, 'you know quite well, and so does Marzell, that nobody could be less of a believer in ghosts and apparitions than I have always been. Never in my life till now have I ever met with anything in the least out of the common, and I had never had the slightest experience of that strange, nervous sense of the proximity of spiritual principles belonging to another state of being which paralyzes both body and mind; but let me tell you what happened the very first night I spent in the house.'