Miss Hughes proved to be a red-haired, hazel-eyed woman of forty-five. She had been for twenty years an outstanding success as a schoolmistress, although her first few years at her schoolmarming had been hell. She was highly intelligent and very strong-willed. Her intelligence saved her from pig-headedness. Her few friends she had made for life and their fondness and loyalty never faltered. She had, rather strangely, no enemies. She had been the third child of a family of twelve, and life in such a very large household had made her a competent improvisor, and her Welsh blood had supplied her with imagination and warm sympathy. She was hard-headed, too, as so many Welsh-women have always had to be, and to run a college, with its problems of discipline and catering, its servants, its workmen, its outside contacts with Education Committee and Ministry, and its own internal problems too numerous and, individually, too unimportant to name, came to her as second nature.

One great stroke of luck she had had, and that was in the situation of the College. The Cotswolds were not the hills of Wales, but they warmed her heart and reconciled her emotionally to what she knew she had sacrificed in leaving her own Welsh valley.

She had made it one of her first duties to call upon the tenants of the ancient manor house, and had taken to Jonathan immediately. Deborah she loved as she would have loved a daughter, and when she heard that Jonathan’s lovely wife had lectured in English for a short time at the famous training college of Cartaret, their friendship was complete, and it followed naturally that Miss Hughes would spend Christmas with the Bradleys instead of remaining in solitary grandeur in the house on the opposite hill.

‘Ghost?’ said Miss Hughes, having listened with great interest to a conversation between Mansell and Bill Fullalove, in which Mansell challenged Bill to deny that he had been the ghost. ‘I didn’t know you had a ghost so near at hand.’

‘Oh, but we have,’ said Jonathan. ‘A very well-authenticated ghost, too, and extremely well-behaved. He never comes nearer the house than that gate over which Mansell and Obury saw him leaning. I’ve been digging him up since we’ve been here. He’s the Reverend Horatius Pile, who skippered this parish from 1801 until 1857, but nobody seems to know for certain how he came to be found dead, leaning over the gate. Yes, of course I’ll take you along to see the gate. Have some more sherry. Aunt Adela brought it with her, so I know it’s all right.’