tent on something; I
could not tell what.

"Do show me the house, Ronald--the drawing-room, and--and--there is
another room I wish to see."

"You shall see them all, dear," I said. "You are excited. It is natural
enough. This is the drawing-room."

She glanced round it hastily.

"And now the others!" she exclaimed.

I took her to the dining-room, the library, and the various apartments
on the ground-floor.

She scarcely looked at them. When we had finished exploring, "Are these
all?" she asked, with a wavering accent of disappointment.

"All," I answered.

"Then--show me the rooms upstairs."

We ascended the shallow oak steps, and passed first into the apartment
in which my grandmother had died.

It had been done up since then, refurnished, and almost completely
altered. Only the wide fireplace, with its brass dogs and its heavy
oaken mantelpiece, had been left untouched.

Margot glanced hastily round. Then she walked up to the fireplace, and
drew a long breath.

"There ought to be a fire here," she said.

"But it is summer," I answered, wondering.

"And a chair there," she went on, in a curious low voice, indicating--I
think now, or is it my imagination?--the very spot where my grandmother
was wont to sit. "Yes--I seem to remember, and yet not to remember."

She looked at me, and her white brows were knit.

Suddenly she said: "Ronald, I don't think I like this room. There is
something--I don't know--I don't think I could sit here; and I seem to
remember--something about it, as I did about the terrace. What can it
mean?"

"It means that you are tired and overexcited, darling. Your nerves are
too highly strung, and nerves play us strange tricks. Come to your own
room and take off your things, and when you have had some tea, you will
be all right again."

Yes, I was fool enough to believe that tea was the panacea for an
undreamed-of, a then unimaginable, evil.

I thought Margot was simply an overtired and imaginative child that
evening. If I could believe so now!

We went up into her boudoir and had tea, and she grew more like
herself; but several times that night I observed her looking puzzled and
thoughtful, and a certain expression of anxiety shone in her blue eyes
that was new to them then.

But I thought nothing of it, and I was-happy. Two or three days
passed, and Mar-got did not again refer to her curious sensation of
pre-knowledge of the house and garden. I fancied there was a slight