The house was a real find, everybody said so. Tucked away in a hidden crescent, it seemed to face the street with a small, secret smile.

Rachel had moved in in October, but with Christmas approaching the house seemed no nearer completion.

When she bought the house, she had felt more than up to the task of bringing it back to beauty.

But then the flu struck, and a scary descent into pneumonia had left her feeling wobbly and weak.

Her parents would have helped more but they were away, working in China.

But they would be here in the morning to stay for Christmas, and Rachel had longed to sit them down to dinner in a sparkling home.

Rachel slumped at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in despair. There was so much to do, and she had so little strength.

Ker-thunk.

The noise came from above her head, and she blinked in surprise. What was it? Just an old house settling, she decided.

Scrape. Ker-thunk.

What WAS that? Rachel jumped up. Careful, now.

She could hear her heart pounding as she went out slowly into the hallway, peering up into the sombre shadows at the first landing.

Nothing. Then as she was turning away... thunk.

It sounded like a heavy bucket being dragged across the floor and plopped down, in her main bedroom.

Rachel gathered herself and began to tiptoe up the stairs. Halfway up she paused, breathless, by a portrait of a little girl which she had found wrapped in sheets at the back of a cupboard.

Solemnly, the child gazed at her, a Victorian child with petticoats and fat sausage ringlets tied up with red ribbons. Rachel gazed back sightlessly. All her attention was on the room upstairs, where she could now her that... hurrying sound.

Taking hold of her courage, she took the rest of the stairs as quickly as her ailing lungs would allow and without pausing to think, she pushed open the bedroom door.

For a split second, she thought she saw something, a whisk of skirt, a flash of something pale. Then she flicked the lightswitch and it was gone. There was no one there, not under the high old bed or in the deep old cupboard.

Rachel sighed and wondered exactly how ill she still was. She turned to leave the room, but paused, mouth open, at the top of the stairs.

For there in the half-gloom below her was a child, standing on the staircase. She stood face to face with the pretty portrait, but this was not the chubby, beribboned daughter of the house.

Her severe black dress was too big for her, but its voluminous folds could not hide her thinness. Rachel could only see the girl's face in profile, for she was staring, transfixed, at the picture with her nose almost close enough to touch the oils. And as Rachel watched, frozen, the little maid raised a stick-like wrist and reached out to touch the picture.

The small white hand reached, so delicately, to stroke the velvet ribbon in the painted girl's lush tresses. Rachel made a slight motion, and in a blink the girl was gone, leaving only the impression of grey eyes huge with fear, and a pale face tilted up towards her.

That night, Rachel went to bed early, exhausted by her dinner preparations and by a sorrow which seemed to gnaw at her heart.

After she had lain for a while, she got up again and opened her linen chest, rooting to the bottom for a packet which had once belonged to her grandmother.

Rachel then went into the kitchen and carefully took out of the paper packet a red velvet ribbon, thick and rich, and tied it to the tree.

And then she slept. Rachel slept so well that she did not awake until her parents rang on the doorbell. And when they exclaimed at the shining hearths, gleaming floors and polished windows of her Victorian palace, she only smiled.

"I' ve had some help," she said, and looked at her tree, jewelled and pretty in the kitchen corner. The red velvet ribbon, of course, was gone.