“Took a nap.  All right!” I said.  “Go on.”

“When I came to, Miss Innes, sure as I’m sittin’ here, I thought I’d die.  Somethin’ hit me on the face, and I set up, sudden.  And then I seen the plaster drop, droppin’ from a little hole in the wall.  And the first thing I knew, an iron bar that long” (fully two yards by her measure) “shot through that hole and tumbled on the bed.  If I’d been still sleeping” ("Fainting,” corrected Rosie) “I’d ‘a’ been hit on the head and killed!”

“I wisht you’d heard her scream,” put in Mary Anne.  “And her face as white as a pillow-slip when she tumbled down the stairs.”

“No doubt there is some natural explanation for it, Eliza,” I said.  “You may have dreamed it, in your `fainting’ attack.  But if it is true, the metal rod and the hole in the wall will show it.”

Eliza looked a little bit sheepish.

“The hole’s there all right, Miss Innes,” she said.  “But the bar was gone when Mary Anne and Rosie went up to pack my trunk.”

“That wasn’t all,” Liddy’s voice came funereally from a corner.  “Eliza said that from the hole in the wall a burning eye looked down at her!”

“The wall must be at least six inches thick,” I said with asperity.  “Unless the person who drilled the hole carried his eyes on the ends of a stick, Eliza couldn’t possibly have seen them.”

But the fact remained, and a visit to Eliza’s room proved it.  I might jeer all I wished:  some one had drilled a hole in the unfinished wall of the ball-room, passing between the bricks of the partition, and shooting through the unresisting plaster of Eliza’s room with such force as to send the rod flying on to her bed.  I had gone up-stairs alone, and I confess the thing puzzled me:  in two or three places in the wall small apertures had been made, none of them of any depth.  Not the least mysterious thing was the disappearance of the iron implement that had been used.

I remembered a story I read once about an impish dwarf that lived in the spaces between the double walls of an ancient castle.  I wondered vaguely if my original idea of a secret entrance to a hidden chamber could be right, after all, and if we were housing some erratic guest, who played pranks on us in the dark, and destroyed the walls that he might listen, hidden safely away, to our amazed investigations.

Mary Anne and Eliza left that afternoon, but Rosie decided to stay.  It was about five o’clock when the hack came from the station to get them, and, to my amazement, it had an occupant.  Matthew Geist, the driver, asked for me, and explained his errand with pride.

“I’ve brought you a cook, Miss Innes,” he said.  “When the message came to come up for two girls and their trunks, I supposed there was something doing, and as this here woman had been looking for work in the village, I thought I’d bring her along.”