Tom Ossingtons Ghost

acutely the fact that we have been sleeping. Something had woke her ; what, she could not tell. She lay motionless, listening with that peculiar intensity with which one is apt to listen when woke suddenly in the middle of the night. The room was dark. There was the sound of distant rumbling : they were at work upon the line, wherethey would sometimes continue shunting from dusk to dawn. She could hear, faintly, the crashing of trucks as they collided the one with the other. A breeze was murmuring across the common. It came from Clapham Junction way?which was how she came to hear the noise of the shunting. All else was still. She must have been mistaken. Nothing had roused her. She must have woke of her own accord. Stay !?what was that ? Her keen set ears caught some scarcely uttered sound. Was it the creaking of a board ? Well, boards will creak at night, when they have a trick of being as audible as if they were exploding guns. It came again?and again. It was unmistakably a board that creaked ? downstairs. Why should a board creak like that downstairs, unless ? it was being stepped upon ? As Madge strained her hearing, she became convinced that there were footsteps down below ? stealthy, muffled footsteps,which would have been inaudible had it not been for the tell-tale boards. Some one was creeping along the passage. Suddenly there was a noise as if a coin, or a key, or some small object, had fallen to the floor. Possibly it was something of the kind which h...