I looked this way and that but saw nothing; and said so.

“Have you ever heard of Master Owen,” he said, “of glorious memory?”

“Why, yes,” I said, “he was a Jesuit lay-brother, martyred under Elizabeth:  and he made hiding-holes, did he not?”

“Well; he hath been at work here.  Look again, Cousin Roger.”

I turned and saw my Cousin Dorothy smiling—­(and it was a very pretty sight too!)—­but there was nothing else to be seen.  I beat with my foot; and it rang a little hollow.

“No, no; those are the cellars,” said my Cousin Tom.

I beat then upon the walls, here and there; but to no purpose; and then upon the stairs.

“That is the sloping roof of the pantry, only,” said my Cousin Tom.

I confessed myself outwitted; and then with great mirth he shewed me how, over the door into the paved hall, there was a space large enough to hold three or four men; and how the panels opened on this side, as well as into the kitchen passage on the other.

“A priest or suchlike might very well lie here a week or two, might he not?” asked my Cousin Tom delightedly; “and if the sentry was at the one side, he might be fed from the other.  It is cunningly contrived, is it not?  A man has but to leap up here from a chair; and he is safe.”

I praised it very highly, to please him; and indeed it was very curious and ingenious.

“But those days are done,” I said.

“Who can tell that?” he cried—­(though a week ago he had told me the same himself).  “Some priest might very well be flying for his life along this road, and turn in here.  Who knows whether it may not be so again?”

I said no more then on that point; though I did not believe him.

“And there is one more matter I must shew you in your own chamber; if you have any private papers and suchlike.”

Then he shewed me in my own room, by the head of the bed that stood along the wall, how one of the panels slid back from its place, discovering a little space behind where a man might very well keep his papers or his money.

“Not a living soul,” he said, “knows of that, besides Dolly and myself.  You are at liberty to use that, Cousin Roger, if you like.”

I thanked him; and said I would do so.

The rest of that day I spent in going about the house, and acquainting myself with it all.  My Cousin Dorothy shewed me the rooms.  Her own was a little one at the head of the stairs; and she told me, smiling, that a ghost was said to walk there.

“But I have never been troubled with it,” she said.  “It is a tall old, woman, they say, who comes up the stairs and into the room; but she does no harm to anyone.”

Next her room, along the front of the house, lay two other greater rooms, one with a fire-place and one without:  then was my chamber, and then her father’s:  and upstairs were the attics where the men lay.  The maids lay in two little rooms above the kitchen.