“Pretty narrow quarters, Jamieson,” said Holmes.  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“Yes, I know,” said Jamieson, with a laugh.  “Don’t you?  I thought you knew this part of the country so well, Holmes.”

“I?  No, I scarcely know it at all, as a matter of fact.  That’s how I got lost this morning when I took these young ladies for a drive and got myself into their bad graces.”

“My mistake!  I thought you did know it.”

Jamieson bent over then and spoke again to the driver, and in a moment they made another turn, but this time into a private road.  Bessie thought she heard a startled exclamation from Holmes, but she was not sure.  Then she looked around.

“What a horrid place!” exclaimed Miss Mercer.  “Look how it’s been allowed to run down.  Oh, I know where we are!  This is the old Tisdall place.  No one has lived here for years.  That’s why it looks so neglected.”

“Right!” said Jamieson.  “Doesn’t that house look creepy, through the trees, with the moonlight on it?  I thought this would be a fine place to come and tell ghost stories.”

This time there was no mistake about Holmes’s angry exclamation.

“Look here, what do you think you’re doing?  What right have you to bring this crowd in here, Jamieson?”

Charlie looked at him in surprise—­a surprise that Bessie knew instinctively was assumed.

“Oh, strictly speaking, I suppose we’re trespassing,” he said.  “But this has always been common property—­for years, at least.  The owners don’t pay any attention to the place.  They won’t mind our coming here, even if they find out.”

“Well, I object—­”

But Holmes stifled the remark before anyone save Bessie and Jamieson heard it.  And Bessie began to understand, and to thrill with a new, scarcely formed idea.  She began to have a glimmering of Jamieson’s plan, and she saw how cleverly Holmes had been induced to walk into the trap that had been set for him.  No matter how much he knew about this mysterious place, and how unwilling he might be to let them explore it, whatever his reason, he could not protest now without revealing plainly that he had been lying before.  And, moreover, he could not be at all sure that it was not pure accident that had led Jamieson to select it as their destination.

Holmes was between two fires.  If he let the ride go on, he faced discovery of something he was trying to keep secret; if he tried to stop it short, or to divert it to some other spot, he was sure to arouse suspicions that, by the merest luck, as he supposed, his treatment of Bessie and Dolly had not aroused.  So he did what most people would do in the same circumstances; he kept still, and trusted to his luck to carry him through.

“Oh, I see,” he said, finally.  “You’re going to stop in the grounds and have a picnic, or something like that, eh?  That’s fine—­that will be great sport.”