woman at the entering
desk if Mrs Ragg, the caretaker of Sea-Strand Cottage, was known to
her. The reply was quite satisfactory. Their cart had always served the
cottage; the woman in charge was a most respectable person; a couple of
ladies who had taken the cottage in the summer had mentioned that she
was also an excellent cook.

The chops were served to us the next morning charred black, uneatable.
I pointed them out to Julia on her appearing, and, with a view to
deprecating her inevitable wrath, frankly so described them. My sister
regarded the lost hopes of our meal with a preoccupied stare; then
turned upon me with the wide distending of her eyelids which I knew
portended a new worry.

"What sort of a night had you?" she asked.

"Excellent. And you?"

"Frightful. My nerves are all on the stretch, in consequence. I give
you warning, Isabella, if you drop your knife or chink your teacup and
saucer I shall scream aloud."

"You didn't sleep?"

"Not a wink."

"Were there noises to disturb you?"

"Not a sound. That was it! Not a din, Isabella."

"That's all right, then."

"Is it? You know my room?--just a lath-and-plaster partition between it
and hers--that woman's. I ought to have heard every movement, even if
she turned in her bed."

"It was very thoughtful of Mrs Ragg to lie so still."

"She was not there, Isabella."

"Not there?"

"I'd stake my life on it. It worried me so at last--I _had_ to listen,
you know--that I got up and put my ear against the partition. The
deadest stillness!"

"But even if she was not there, I don't see it is so very alarming."

"She says she was. I asked her just now if she was sleeping next to me,
and she said yes."

"She was, then."

"She wasn't."

I poured out the tea with impatience. What a constant worry Julia was!
Without appearing to cast a backward thought upon the chops, she
buttered herself a piece of toast.

"Of course, at last, I did fall asleep," she admitted. "And that was
the worst of all. Isabella, I dreamt of that horrible little room next
to mine, and of the reason it was so still."

"Well?"

"I dreamt there was a dead woman in it."

I laughed at that, and Julia, pausing in the act of taking a bite from
her toast, glared angrily at me.

"You are a nice, soothing sort of person to be sent away with one
supposed to be in want of cheering influences!" I said. "You and your
dream of a dead woman!"

"I dreamt one was there," Julia said, goin