unaccountably caught the curtains in her own room,
been, by any possibility, a fire purposely kindled, to force her out?

She dropped into the nearest chair, faint with horror, as those three
questions forced themselves in rapid succession on her mind.

After waiting a little, she recovered self-possession enough to
recognize the first plain necessity of putting her suspicions to the
test. It was possible that her excited fancy had filled her with a
purely visionary alarm. For all she knew to the contrary, there might be
some undeniably sufficient reason for changing the position of the bed.
She went out, and knocked at the door of Hester Dethridge's room.

"I want to speak to you," she said.

Hester came out. Anne pointed to the spare room, and led the way to it.
Hester followed her.

"Why have you changed the place of the bed," she asked, "from the wall
there, to the wall here?"

Stolidly submissive to the question, as she had been stolidly submissive
to the fire, Hester Dethridge wrote her reply. On all other occasions
she was accustomed to look the persons to whom she offered her slate
steadily in the face. Now, for the first time, she handed it to Anne
with her eyes on the floor. The one line written contained no direct
answer: the words were these:

"I have meant to move it, for some time past."

"I ask you why you have moved it."

She wrote these four words on the slate: "The wall is damp."

Anne looked at the wall. There was no sign of damp on the paper. She
passed her hand over it. Feel where she might, the wall was dry.

"That is not your reason," she said.

Hester stood immovable.

"There is no dampness in the wall."

Hester pointed persistently with her pencil to the four words, still
without looking up--waited a moment for Anne to read them again--and
left the room.

It was plainly useless to call her back. Anne's first impulse when she
was alone again was to secure the door. She not only locked it, but
bolted it at top and bottom. The mortise of the lock and the staples
of the bolts, when she tried them, were firm. The lurking
treachery--wherever else it might be--was not in the fastenings of the
door.

She looked all round the room; examining the fire place, the window and
its shutters, the interior of the wardrobe, the hidden space under the
bed. Nothing was any where to be discovered which could justify the most
timid person living in feeling suspicion or alarm.

Appearances, fair