Lady Farquhar's Old Lady

Sea air is prescribed for Margaret's health, so her family takes a quiet house on the Irish coast for the winter. One room is kept from them — locked, the key left in the door, crowded with furniture a generation older than the rest. Dressing for dinner one bright March evening, she watches a small, stooped woman in a gray gown and drawn bonnet walk the passage and pass through that locked door. When she and her sister search the room, it is empty.

She tells it later at a Christmas fireside, reluctantly, and the fear is all restraint: no chains, no shrieks, only a face about to speak, and the question of what it wanted to say.