He understood Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; and, therefore, according to the apprehension, and in the phrase of his brother Wilfred, needed not to care "for ghaist or bar-ghaist, devil or dobbie." Yea, the servants persisted that they had heard him hold conversations in the library, when every varsal soul in the family were gone to bed; and that he spent the night in watching for bogles, and the morning in sleeping in his bed, when he should have been heading the hounds like a true Osbaldistone.
All these absurd rumours I had heard in broken hints and imperfect sentences, from which I was left to draw the inference; and, as easily may be supposed, I laughed them to scorn.

But the extreme solitude to which this chamber of evil fame was committed every night after curfew time, was an additional reason why I should not intrude on Miss Vernon when she chose to sit there in the evening.
To resume what I was saying,--I was not surprised to see a glimmering of light from the library windows: but I was a little struck when I distinctly perceived the shadows of two persons pass along and intercept the light from the first of the windows, throwing the casement for a moment into shade.

"It must be old Martha," thought I, "whom Diana has engaged to be her companion for the evening; or I must have been mistaken, and taken Diana's shadow for a second person.

No, by Heaven! it appears on the second window,--two figures distinctly traced; and now it is lost again--it is seen on the third--on the fourth--the darkened forms of two persons distinctly seen in each window as they pass along the room, betwixt the windows and the lights.

Whom can Diana have got for a companion ?"--The passage of the shadows between the lights and the casements was twice repeated, as if to satisfy me that my observation served me truly; after which the lights were extinguished, and the shades, of course, were seen no more.
Trifling as this circumstance was, it occupied my mind for a considerable time.