“Get up,” I said, “if you don’t want to be murdered in your bed.”

“Where?  How?” she yelled vociferously, and jumped up.

“There’s somebody in the house,” I said.  “Get up.  We’ll have to get to the telephone.”

“Not out in the hall!” she gasped; “Oh, Miss Rachel, not out in the hall!” trying to hold me back.  But I am a large woman and Liddy is small.  We got to the door, somehow, and Liddy held a brass andiron, which it was all she could do to lift, let alone brain anybody with.  I listened, and, hearing nothing, opened the door a little and peered into the hall.  It was a black void, full of terrible suggestion, and my candle only emphasized the gloom.  Liddy squealed and drew me back again, and as the door slammed, the mirror I had put on the transom came down and hit her on the head.  That completed our demoralization.  It was some time before I could persuade her she had not been attacked from behind by a burglar, and when she found the mirror smashed on the floor she wasn’t much better.

“There’s going to be a death!” she wailed.  “Oh, Miss Rachel, there’s going to be a death!”

“There will be,” I said grimly, “if you don’t keep quiet, Liddy Allen.”

And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would last until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to town.  If we had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late!

The sun came finally, and from my window I watched the trees along the drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike appearance, become gray and then green.  The Greenwood Club showed itself a dab of white against the hill across the valley, and an early robin or two hopped around in the dew.  Not until the milk-boy and the sun came, about the same time, did I dare to open the door into the hall and look around.  Everything was as we had left it.  Trunks were heaped here and there, ready for the trunk-room, and through an end window of stained glass came a streak of red and yellow daylight that was eminently cheerful.  The milk-boy was pounding somewhere below, and the day had begun.

Thomas Johnson came ambling up the drive about half-past six, and we could hear him clattering around on the lower floor, opening shutters.  I had to take Liddy to her room up-stairs, however,—­she was quite sure she would find something uncanny.  In fact, when she did not, having now the courage of daylight, she was actually disappointed.

Well, we did not go back to town that day.

The discovery of a small picture fallen from the wall of the drawing-room was quite sufficient to satisfy Liddy that the alarm had been a false one, but I was anything but convinced.  Allowing for my nerves and the fact that small noises magnify themselves at night, there was still no possibility that the picture had made the series of sounds I heard.  To prove it, however, I dropped it again.  It fell with a single muffled crash of its wooden frame, and incidentally ruined itself beyond repair.  I justified myself by reflecting that if the Armstrongs chose to leave pictures in unsafe positions, and to rent a house with a family ghost, the destruction of property was their responsibility, not mine.