dozen yards beyond the bedroom door, proceeded, under a square-topped archway and down one step, to a fairly large bathroom and to the back stairs. These stairs led down to the kitchen and up to the attics, and were lighted at the top by a large window which overlooked the almost enclosed courtyard. This window, oddly enough, could be closed by shutters on the inside of the glass.
The bathroom door opened on the right of the passage, at the end of which was another bedroom which overlooked the garden. There was a rather similar passage at the opposite end of the landing, but on this side there was no bathroom, and the bedrooms were considerably smaller.
There was one item of particular interest which she had overlooked on her previous visits. This was that a small room, apparently a dressing-room, opened off the side of what, to herself, she called Cousin Tom's room, but the communicating-door had been papered over, so that, at a casual glance, it was unlikely that the fact that it was not quite flush with the rest of the wall would be apparent.
She went over and examined it again when she had explored the bathroom passage to its end. The job of disguising the doorway had been so well done that it almost seemed as though deliberate thought had been given to the possibility of hiding it. She ran her finger round the opening, being very careful not to press hard enough to break the wall-paper, and then went into the adjoining room to study the doorway from that side. The same neat, careful job had been made, and she now noted more particularly a fact which had struck her before—that the opening from the passage leading into this smaller room was not, and never had been, a doorway in which to hang a door— it was merely an arch which had been formed by removing bricks from the passage wall.
Whether these alterations had any sinister implication still had to be discovered. She noted them, and passed on. The attics, which she thought might repay inspection, proved disappointing in that they were entirely empty. Whatever lumber the house might once have harboured was not now on this top floor. She inspected the boards closely. They were dusty, but not unduly so, and she supposed that these rooms, in common with the other parts of the house to which the public were not usually admitted, received attention at intervals from the caretaker and his daughter. There was an absence of cobwebs which suggested that the last cleaning of the attics had been of fairly recent date.
She walked over to the window in each room and looked out, but beyond an extended view of the country around the house, the windows had nothing to offer. She tested the catches. They were rusty, and it did not seem as though the windows could have been opened for some considerable time, certainly not when the rooms had last been cleaned.
The attics did not cover the whole of the floor beneath, but belonged, it seemed, to the older part of the present structure, for the rooms on the opposite side of the house had no attics built over them. The lower roofs could be seen from two of the attic windows. The courtyard could not be seen from any of the upstair windows except the shuttered window on the stairs.
She was about to descend the narrow stairs when she noticed what seemed to be ventilation holes in the partition wall at the top of the staircase. When the attic doors were shut this partition wall was in darkness. She looked back, and saw that one of the doors which she believed she had shut and locked was swinging slowly open.
With a feeling more of interest than of anything approaching alarm, she went back to find out what had happened. She had not anticipated anything in the way of a supernatural occurrence, but she was relieved, all the same, to discover that the trouble was due to a defective lock and did not emanate from the realm of the spirits.
She pushed the door wide open, and went back to examine the air-holes. It was now obvious that they ventilated a large cupboard, or small, unlighted room, on the opposite side of the passage. The door of it had been papered over to match the rest of the decorations of the attic corridor, and again, like the door into the dressing-room on the floor below, would, in the ordinary-way, pass unnoticed. She traced the outline of the door beneath the paper, closed the attic door again, and this time, fastened it securely, and then, with some part of her theory if not proved, at any rate capable of proof, she returned to the first floor and made an exhaustive search.
Nothing further was to be discovered there, however, and she spent the next three-quarters of an hour in checking the plan of the house which formed the only illustration to the little guidebook she had purchased on her previous visit, and in preparing a sketch-plan of her own on which she marked the door with the faulty lock, the position of the two attic cupboards, the blocked-up and papered-over communicating door between the largest bedroom, and the window with the inside shutters and the dressing-room at the top of the stairs.
Her next objective was the courtyard. This was a rectangular strip of garden which had been made almost into a quadrangle by the addition of the newest wing. It was overgrown with tall weeds, the willow-herb flourishing particularly. There was a well at one corner, close to the scullery door. A couple of boards formed the cover. She removed them, peered into the well and then replaced the boards.
Although it was broad daylight, the courtyard looked eerie and desolate. It was silent, too, and the surrounding buildings seemed to shut out the sun. It was curious, she thought, that none of the windows, even of the new buildings, overlooked it. It seemed chilly out there. Mrs. Bradley made a careful exploration, even parting continually the long weeds to make certain that the surface of the courtyard was everywhere the same. This examination yielded nothing.
She left the house before the caretaker returned to it. Then, later in the afternoon, she sought him out, and asked him one or two trivial questions before she put to him the important query suggested by her visit.
'What has become of the well-cover, I wonder?' she said, in the most casual tone she could command.
'Well-cover? It was covered with two planks last time
'I shouldn't have thought two planks would have been sufficient to cover so deep a well, and one which has the opening level with the ground,' replied Mrs. Bradley. 'But, of course, it's no business of mine. One thing, I see that you are able to keep the flap of the cellar staircase screwed down. That's something.'
'If any of the visitors brings children, I keeps my eye on things,' said the old man. 'Anyway, this yere courtyard beant on the reg'lar routine. Nothing to see out here. I've give up most of the garden, too, I 'ave. Just keep the front a bit tidy. I thought maybe some of them it belonged to might pay a jobbing gardener to come in now and again. It's a mort of work for an old fellow like me, and I can't keep upsides with it nohow. Barring the little wife of that poor gentleman as was killed, and she only come the once, I don't believe anybody's took that much interest in doing a bit of spade-work. Seems a shame, like, don't it?'
Mrs. Bradley emphatically dissented from this view, but she did not say so. As soon as she left the haunted house this time she went back to Miss Biddle.
'I'm becoming a nuisance,' she remarked, 'but there is one thing I want to know, and I don't know of anybody else who can help me. These screamings and knockings that seem to have been heard before the death of Mr. Tom Turney ...?'
'I'never heard them myself,' Miss Biddle confessed, 'but I know who did, and that's my daily woman. But weren't they heard
'What kind of witness would she make? I mean, is she the kind to exaggerate what she heard?'
'Oh, yes, certainly. On the other hand, she certainly did hear something. I put down in my commonplace book what she said at the time, and I attach importance to it because it was the first that anybody heard, it seems, of that part of the hauntings, so that it could not have been the result of hearsay, or owing anything to village gossip.'
Mrs. Bradley mentally blessed the commonplace book, of which she had heard on her previous visit, and begged that it might be produced. The entry was not dated—a point not of very great importance, since Cousin Tom's death was referred to, and this fixed the time sufficiently for those circumstances which she suspected that she was investigating.
The entry read:
Mrs. Bradley asked permission to make a copy of the entry, and, having made it, autographed a copy of one of her own books at Miss Biddle's deprecating but eager request, departed, went back to the inn, carefully collated such information as she now possessed, heard half a dozen more legends of ancient hauntings from the villagers, and went off again to interview Mrs. Muriel.
'I want you to come back to that house with me, Mrs. Turney,' she said. A request couched in such terms was almost bound to be refused, and Mrs. Bradley was not at all surprised to hear Cousin Muriel reply :
'Oh, no, really, really, I couldn't. You don't know what you're asking! I'll tell you anything you like about the house, but I couldn't possibly set foot in it again, and nobody ought to expect it.'
As Mrs. Bradley did not expect it she inclined her head sympathetically and added :
'You came to hear of the house through Bella Foxley, and you say that she had recommended houses to you before?'
'Well, yes. She had rather a flair, Tom used to say. She found Hazy for us. You know—that house where two men of the Plague Year walk about and say, 'Bring out your dead.' Of course, they never
