Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1916-11-11 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

NOVEMBER 11, 1918.  dust-strewn strings of pearls, and about the bones of the once fair body hung shreds and tatters of priceless old lace and a yellowed, once white, satin gown, the skirt of which here and there disclosed the bared and pitifully grotesque outlines of the old-fashioned "hoops;" the fleshless feet were still held fast in the remnants of what once had been a tiny, high-heeled pair of pearl-embroidered shoes. So this was the mystery of the Wainscotted Room! No wonder that the place should have held such an eerie, depressing air, such a tainted, uncanny atmosphere! A mystery, too, in great measure was its history bound to remain, for with the principal actors all vanished in the past, one could never be sure how it was that this poor victim of villainy had been brought to such an untimely death. Had she been poisoned, stabbed, strangled? No one could now tell us. Worst of all, perhaps, had she been iniinured here by an insanely jealous husband, and left to die the slow death of star:zation and thirst, locked in behind Many doors from which no moan or cry for help might ever reach to any human ear save one, and that one pitiless? Whatever tortures she may have endured, it was later proved beyond shadow of doubt that the skeleton in the wainscotted room was that of the 'lovely if foolish young wife of my jealous and no doubt insane predecessor, she who was supposed to have run away with the cousin who loved her. We had the remains removed, of course, and got them Christian burial in the graveyard under. the shadow of the old church tower.  Perhaps that was why the ghost of the murdered lady never troubled us again; or perhaps it was that she, poor bruised and innocent thing, was content to lie quiet and at rest, now that her fair fame as an honest wife was at last redeemed and unsmirched. To have been murdered—that had been cruel and terrible enough—but,to;have ane's name unjustly handed down to posterity as that of a shameful woman who had left her husband for the arms of another—she that had only shown a girlish, iond, cousinly affection in the last Fad hours before parting—that were indeed too much for the lovely and innocent lady, the memory of whose childlike, elusive charm and smile still haunts me sometimes in the dawn of day. For unlike other ghosily tants, it was in the dawn, not the dark, that her • walking" was done; that very hour of the dawiiing day in which, alter .:ier lover-like cousiii had bede her a lifelong farewell, her husband had cruelly done her to death. I felt grateful to have been the means, even indirectly, of setting the poor soul at last at e But though she troubled none of us again, knowledge of the tragedy so long lying hidden beside us put even my commonsense self not a little out of conceit with the Grange. It had not been possible, either, to keep the whole truth of u, t had occurred from Letty's ears; and as a com quence, there were certain distressing symptoms of a return of her old ne:wousness. _ _ _  So, on the whole, I felt glad thLt, I had been wise in my generation, and taken Newbury GrangS on a year's trial, instead of buying it outright as I had been tempted at first to do. And yet, when our one year's tenancy was up, and we folded our tents and moved away to fresh woods and pastures new, it was almost with a feeling of loneliness and luctance that I bade good-bye to the strange old house, and the memory of the lovely laughing lady who had walked there. in the dawn.