ll low, still whispering, but not quite so deep as
the first. It sounded like a woman's.

Local tradition had it that the place held the ghosts of those who had
died in agony within its noisome dungeons; but she had always been far
too matter-of-fact to accept stories of the supernatural. Yet at that
moment her ears did not deceive her. That pile of grim, gaunt ruins was
a House of Whispers!

Again she listened, never moving a muscle. An owl hooted weirdly in the
ivy far above her, while near, at her feet, a rabbit scuttled away
through the grass. Such noises she was used to. She knew every
night-sound of the country-side; for when she had finished her work in
the library she often went, unknown to the household, with Stewart upon
his nocturnal rounds, and walked miles through the woods in the night.
The grey-eyed, thin-nosed head-keeper was her particular favourite. He
knew so much of natural history, and he taught her all he knew. She
could distinguish the cries of birds in the night, and could tell by
certain sounds made by them, as they were disturbed, that no other
intruders were in the vicinity. But that weird whispering, coming as it
did from an undiscovered source, was inhuman and utterly uncanny.

Was it possible that her ears had deceived her? Was it one of the omens
believed in by the superstitious? The wall whence the voices appeared to
emanate was, she knew, about seven feet thick--an outer wall of the old
keep. She was aware of this because in one of the folio tomes in the
library was a picture of the castle as it appeared in 1510, taken from
some manuscript of that period preserved in the British Museum. She, who
had explored the ruins dozens of times, knew well that at the point
where she was standing there could be no place of concealment. Beyond
that wall, the hill, covered with bushes and brushwood, descended sheer
for three hundred feet or so to the bottom of the glen. Had the voices
sounded from one or other of the half-choked chambers which remained
more or less intact she would not have been so puzzled; but, as it was,
the weird whisperings seemed to come forth from space. Sometimes they
sounded so low that she could scarcely hear them; at others they were so
loud that she could almost distinguish the words uttered by the unseen.
Was it merely a phenomenon caused by the wind blowing through some crack
in the ponderous lichen-covered wall?

She looked beyond at the great dark yew, the justice-tr