“ ‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Heywood,’ she said in great confusion; ‘I thought you had gone to church with the rest.’
“ ‘I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,’ I replied. ‘But—forgive me, Miss Hetheridge,’ I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence—‘don’t you think you would have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?’
“ ‘The better day the better deed,’ she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room.
“ ‘Excuse me, Laetitia,’ I resumed, very seriously, ‘but I want to tell you something.’
“She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. ‘If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Heywood, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.’ So saying she walked out of the room.
“The rest of the day I did not find very merry. I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to bed early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of Lewton Grange.”
“And lost a good wife, perhaps, for the sake of a ghost, uncle!” said Janet.
“If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long.”