Mary Anne.

Her story, broken with sobs and corrections from the other two, was
this: At two o'clock (two-fifteen, Rosie insisted) she had gone
up-stairs to get a picture from her room to show Mary Anne. (A picture
of a LADY, Mary Anne interposed.) She went up the servants' staircase
and along the corridor to her room, which lay between the trunk-room
and the unfinished ball-room. She heard a sound as she went down the
corridor, like some one moving furniture, but she was not nervous. She
thought it might be men examining the house after the fire the night
before, but she looked in the trunk-room and saw nobody.

She went into her room quietly. The noise had ceased, and everything
was quiet. Then she sat down on the side of her bed, and, feeling
faint--she was subject to spells--("I told you that when I came, didn't
I, Rosie?" "Yes'm, indeed she did!")--she put her head down on her
pillow and--

"Took a nap. All right!" I said. "Go on."

"When I came to, Miss Innes, sure as I'm sittin' here, I thought I'd
die. Somethin' hit me on the face, and I set up, sudden. And then I
seen the plaster drop, droppin' from a little hole in the wall. And
the first thing I knew, an iron bar that long" (fully two yards by her
measure) "shot through that hole and tumbled on the bed. If I'd been
still sleeping" ("Fainting," corrected Rosie) "I'd 'a' been hit on the
head and killed!"

"I wisht you'd heard her scream," put in Mary Anne. "And her face as
white as a pillow-slip when she tumbled down the stairs."

"No doubt there is some natural explanation for it, Eliza," I said.
"You may have dreamed it, in your 'fainting' attack. But if it is
true, the metal rod and the hole in the wall will show it."

Eliza looked a little bit sheepish.

"The hole's there all right, Miss Innes," she said. "But the bar was
gone when Mary Anne and Rosie went up to pack my trunk."

"That wasn't all," Liddy's voice came funereally from a corner. "Eliza
said that from the hole in the wall a burning eye looked down at her!"

"The wall must be at least six inches thick," I said with asperity.
"Unless the person who drilled the hole carried his eyes on the ends of
a stick, Eliza couldn't possibly have seen them."

But the fact remained, and a visit to Eliza's room proved it. I might
jeer all I wished: some one had drilled a hole in the unfinished wall
of the ball-room, passing between the bricks of the partition, and
shooting through t