y of Dainty to
intrude on her whenever it seemed desirable to do so.

The room adjoining hers was an unused bedroom that communicated with
hers by a narrow curtained door back of her bed. How easy it had been
for the intruder to enter the vacant room, imitate the monk's cough
there to the heart's content, then glide through the curtained door to
the bedside, alarming the sleeping girl by a cold touch or hacking
cough, and escaping before she could give any alarm!

Love even found that a small hole had been bored in the wall between the
two rooms, thus affording an opportunity for the use of chemicals in
displaying the grisly green light whose weird play upon the walls and
about the room had so alarmed the victims of the cruel joke.

"How careless I have been! I should have discovered all this long ago if
I had believed it was aught but a girl's nervous fancies; but mammy's
corroboration assures me it was reality. Now I shall take such steps
that she will never be annoyed again," he said, sternly; and suited the
action to the word by giving up the room next his own, an airy
dressing-room, to Dainty's use, making it perfectly safe by having in a
carpenter to attach a wire to the young girl's bed, that, running along
the ceiling, passed through into his own room, with a large bell at the
end.

The whole household was made aware of this unique ghost alarm, and Love
said, sternly:

"At the least disturbance in Miss Chase's room, she has but to touch the
wire by her bed, and the communicating bell will ring close to me, so
that I can fly to her rescue. I do not need to say that the practical
joker will fare badly at my hands."

Poor, nervous, shaken black mammy had been sent home to rest.

Dainty would not need any one, now that she had her ghost alarm, the
young man said, smilingly; and every one understood his determination to
protect his love at every hazard. The guilty party must have felt rather
disconcerted at the turn affairs had taken.

Black mammy had not told any one yet that she had a clew by which she
hoped to win the reward Love had offered for the detection of the
impostor; but after she had grappled with the wretch who was bearing off
Dainty, she had found in the claw-like grasp of her fingers some bits of
torn torchon lace that might have been clutched forcibly from the sleeve
of a night-dress.

She kept the fragments carefully, determining to find the garment they
matched.

CHAPTER XVII.