CHAPTER XLII.
THE PLEASURES OF WYNCOMB.
That shrill anguish-stricken cry which Ellen Whitelaw had heard on the night of the stranger's visit to Wyncomb Farm haunted her afterwards with a wearisome persistence.

She could not forget that wild unearthly sound; she could not help continually trying to find some solution for the mystery, until her brain was tired with the perpetual effort.
Ponder upon this matter as she might, she could find no reasonable explanation of the enigma; and in spite of her common sense--a quality of which she possessed a very fair share--she was fain to believe at last that this grim bare-looking old house was haunted, and that the agonised shriek she and Mrs.Tadman had heard that night was only the ghostly sound of some cry wrung from a bleeding heart in days gone by, the echo of an anguish that had been in the far past.
She even went so far as to ask her husband one day if he had ever heard that the house was haunted, and whether there was any record of crime or wrong that had been done in it in the past.

Mr.Whitelaw seemed scarcely to relish the question; but after one of his meditative pauses laughed his wife's inquiry to scorn, and told her that there were no ghosts at Wyncomb except the ghosts of dead rats that had ravaged the granaries--and certainly _they_ seemed to rise from their graves in spite of poison and traps, cats and ferrets--and that, as to anything that had been done in the house in days gone by, he had never heard tell that his ancestors had ever done anything but eat and drink and sleep, and save money from year's end to year's end; and a hard time they'd had of it to pay their way and put something by, in the face of all the difficulties that surround the path of a farmer.
If Ellen Whitelaw's life had been as the lives of happier women, full of small daily cares and all-engrossing domestic interests, the memory of that unearthly scream would no doubt have faded out of her mind ere long, instead of remaining, as it did, a source of constant perplexity to her.
But there was no interest, no single charm in her life.

There was nothing in the world left for her to care for.

The fertile flats around Wyncomb Farmhouse bounded her universe.