Our Admirable Betty by Jeffery Farnol

Mr. Dalroyd stepped out into a summer night radiant with moonbeams and full of the heady perfume of ripening hay. Far as eye could see the wide road stretched away very silent and deserted, not a light gleamed anywhere, the village had been deep-plunged in slumber hours ago.

Mr. Dalroyd sauntered on, past silent cottages, across a trim green and so to the churchyard gate, beyond which the tombstones rose, phantom-like beneath the moon. For a while he stood to contemplate this quiet scene, then started and glanced up at the church tower as a deep-toned bell began to chime the hour of midnight. One by one he counted the deliberate strokes, waited until the last had boomed and died away, then, opening the gate, stepped into the churchyard and strolled on among the graves, his cane airily a-swing, following the paved walk that led round the church. Thus he presently passed from light into shadow, a gloom all the deeper by contrast with the moon's bright splendour, a gloom in which carved headstone and sarcophagus took on strange and unexpected shapes. Suddenly Mr. Dalroyd's cane faltered in its airy swing, stopped, and he stood motionless, his body rigid, his breath in check, his eyes wide and staring. Before him loomed a great mausoleum, its pallid outline vague in the half-light, but on this side the weatherworn marble was cracked and split and from this yawning fissure a ghastly radiance streamed; then this unholy light vanished and upon the stillness came a ghostly rustling, a soft thud and the sound of heavy breathing. Mr. Dalroyd shrank cowering into the deeper shadow of a buttress and dropping his cane upon the grass groped for the hilt of his small-sword.