“You ate too much at dinner,” he said shortly.  “You oughtn’t to have taken that brandy-cherries ice.”

They had very soon got past the stage during which Donnington had tried to say pretty things to Bubbles.

“Perhaps I did”—­he felt the gurgle of amusement in her voice.  “I was very hungry, and the food here is very good.  It must be costing a lot of money—­all this sort of thing.  How nice to be rich!  Oh, Bill, how very nice to be rich!”

“I don’t agree,” he said sharply.  “Varick doesn’t look particularly happy, that I can see.”

“I wonder if Aunt Blanche would marry him now?”

“I don’t suppose he’d give her the chance—­now.”

It wasn’t a very chivalrous thing to say, or hear said, and Bubbles pinched him so viciously that he nearly cried out.

“You’re not to talk like that of my Aunt Blanche.  Quite lately—­not three months ago—­someone asked her to marry him for the thousandth time!  But of course she said no—­as I shall do to you, a thousand times too, if we live long enough.”

She waited a moment, then said slowly:  “Her man’s rather like you.  He’s very much what you will be, Bill, in about thirty years from now—­a plain, good, priggish old fellow.  Of course you know who it is?  Mark Gifford, of the Home Office.  Aunt Blanche only keeps in with him because he’s very useful to her sometimes.”

And then she added, with a touch of strange cruelty, “Just as I shall always keep in with you, Bill, however tiresome and disagreeable you may be!  Just because I find you so useful.  You’re being useful now; I don’t feel frightened any more.”

She drew herself from the shelter of his strong, protecting arm, and slid along the polished step till she leant against the banister.  He could just see the whiteness of her little face shining out of the big fur collar.

“If you’re feeling all right again,” he said rather coolly, “I think we’d both better go to bed.  Speaking for myself, I feel sleepy!”

But she was sliding towards him again, and again she clutched his arm.  “No, no,” she whispered.  “Let’s wait just a little longer, Bill.  I—­I don’t feel quite comfortable in that room.  I wonder if they’d give me a new room to-morrow?  It’s funny, I’m not a bit frightened at what they call the haunted room here—­the room that’s next to Aunt Blanche’s, in the other wing of the house.  A woman who killed her little stepson is supposed to haunt that room.”

“I know,” said Donnington shortly.  “I’ve been reading about it in a book downstairs. I shouldn’t care to sleep in a room where such a thing had been done—­ghost or no ghost!”

And then Bubbles said something which rather startled him.  “Bill,” she whispered, leaning yet closer to him, “I raised that ghost two nights ago.”

“What do you mean?” he asked sternly.

“I mean that Aunt Blanche and that tiresome Pegler of hers had already been here a week and nothing had happened.  And then—­the first night I was in the house the ghost appeared!”