of whom
one had been married a year, although then forty years old, to a curate
about sixty-five years old. The sisters unmarried were between fifty and
sixty years old, stern and stiff-rumped. Maris the married one, fat and
forty, with jet-black hair and merry hazel eyes, had been disappointed
in her youth, and when this clergyman, whom she had known all her life,
proposed, she accepted I suppose for companionship, and because it gave
her consideration in the neighbourhood.

The house was originally a very big old mansion, large enough for two
schools, and had been roughly divided by walls and partitions into two
houses. The smaller was inhabited by Maria and her husband, and the
kitchen-garden was attached to it. All access to the pleasure-grounds
of the other, or school-part of the house, was bricked up. In an
establishment for young ladies, all of a fuckable age, and none without
hair on their cunts, it would never have done to leave male access, not
even to a curate sixty-five years old. The gardeners were elderly men,
they came round by the house to go to the kitchen-garden, which supplied
both houses. Mrs. Maria used to go round to the school daily.

The air of the neighbourhood was fine, and although not professing to
lodge people, if any of the female relatives of the young ladies at
the school desired it, they could go and stop for a week or two at the
curate's, of course paying for so doing.

Fred and I had invitations to shooting not far off, just as my aunt went
to stay a week at Mrs. Maria's and to see her girl. Our friends could
accommodate Fred only, and sooner than be separated, and for other
reasons, we wrote to the old curate to know if he could receive us two
men,--and my aunt as well,--which he did. We took up our quarters there.
I had unpacked, and went into Fred's room. "Here is a jolly cupboard,"
said he opening the door of one big enough for four people to stand in.
"If a woman were sleeping here, she would always be thinking some one
was hidden in it; it's a jolly place for boxes and clothes." He was
hanging up something, when he stopped and listened. "Damned if there are
not women laughing," said he, "hish!" But he heard nothing more.

Two or three minutes afterwards he said, "Here Walter," and both
listening heard the voices of women, but very indistinctly. Fred lighted
a candle. Said he, "Here is an old door screwed up, it leads into a
room. What a lark to get it, open, or a hole through