I don't quite know yet what it all means.
She thinks she's seen something, but I daresay it's only one of them
owls."

"Oh, no, no, no, no!" sobbed Bella, "it was something dreadful--
something dreadful!"

"Well, well, then, my dear, tell us what it is," said Martha, in her
most motherly way, "and it will do you good."

"Oh, it was dreadful!" moaned Bella. "I remembered that I had forgotten
to shut the window in master's chamber, which I opened this afternoon to
let the sun in and get the room aired, and without stopping to fetch a
light I went up in the dark, and then--and then--Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh
dear! Oh dear!"

"Take another sniff of the feathers, my dear, and have a good sneeze,
and that will relieve you."

"Oh, do a-done, cook, and throw the nasty thing behind the fire. I was
just coming out again into the gallery, when I heard something horrid."

"Heard?" cried Waller excitedly. "Then you didn't see it?"

"No, Master Waller. I only heard it walking. Somewhere up by your
room--I mean your den, as you call it. And then all in the dark there
come _bumpity bump_ all down the stairs, and I shruck and shruck again,
and ran for my life."

"My!" said cook. "Was it as bad as that? But what was it, my dear?"

"Oh, I don't know, cook. Something dreadfully horrid, and it was
dragging a dead body all down the stairs, and knocking the back of the
head hard on every step."

"Fancy!" said Martha, with an emphatic sniff. "It's all stuff, and
nonsense. No such thing could have happened. It was all because you
went up in the dark."

From feeling startled, and in dread of his secret being known, a rapid
change came over Waller; half-suspecting what must have occurred, and
finding it covered by the girl's superstitious notions, added to which
there were the feathers, the sneezes, and the cook's blessings upon his
Majesty King George the Third, the boy's risible faculties were so
bestirred that he burst into a roar of laughter.

The effect was almost magical. Bella, who had been lying stretched out
upon her back, tapping the floor with her heels occasionally in her
paroxysms, suddenly started bolt upright, to exclaim in an indignant
voice--

"Yes, it's all very fine for you to laugh, Master Waller!"

"Well, who wouldn't laugh at such nonsense?" said the boy.

"But it isn't nonsense, nor it isn't stuff, cook. You may laugh, sir,
but there's something walks up and down there in the dead of the nig