He laughed, he looked out of the window.
He would have given that fellow money to tell him why he said that.

But there was no good in looking for the scamp; he was gone.
A memory not preoccupied with that lake and its omens, and a presentiment about himself, would not have noted such things.

But _his_ mind they touched indelibly; and he was ashamed of his childish slavery, but could not help it.
The foundation of all this had been laid in the nursery, in the winter's tales told by its fireside, and which seized upon his fancy and his fears with a strange congeniality.
There is a large bedroom at Mardykes Hall, which tradition assigns to the lady who had perished tragically in the lake.

Mrs.Julaper was sure of it; for her aunt, who died a very old woman twenty years before, remembered the time of the lady's death, and when she grew to woman's estate had opportunity in abundance; for the old people who surrounded her could remember forty years farther back, and tell everything connected with the old house in beautiful Miss Feltram's time.
This large old-fashioned room, commanding a view of Snakes Island, the fells, and the lake--somewhat vast and gloomy, and furnished in a stately old fashion--was said to be haunted, especially when the wind blew from the direction of Golden Friars, the point from which it blew on the night of her death in the lake; or when the sky was overcast, and thunder rolled among the lofty fells, and lightning gleamed on the wide sheet of water.
It was on a night like this that a lady visitor, who long after that event occupied, in entire ignorance of its supernatural character, that large room; and being herself a lady of a picturesque turn, and loving the grander melodrama of Nature, bid her maid leave the shutters open, and watched the splendid effects from her bed, until, the storm being still distant, she fell asleep.
It was travelling slowly across the lake, and it was the deep-mouthed clangour of its near approach that startled her, at dead of night, from her slumber, to witness the same phenomena in the tremendous loudness and brilliancy of their near approach.
At this magnificent spectacle she was looking with the awful ecstasy of an observer in whom the sense of danger is subordinated to that of the sublime, when she saw suddenly at the window a woman, whose long hair and dress seemed drenched with water.

She was gazing in with a look of terror, and was shaking the sash of the window with vehemence.