g on with her toast. "In my
opinion one _was_ there," she added, doggedly.

When she had finished her breakfast, and had withdrawn her thoughts
from the engrossing subject of her dream sufficiently to grumble about
the aching void where the chops should have been, she sprang up from
the table and loudly tinkled the little bell.

"For Mrs Ragg to clear away," she explained to me. "While she is doing
so, and you, Isabella, keep her attention engaged on things below, I am
going upstairs to have a look at her bedroom."

"Absurd!" I ejaculated.

"Aren't you absurd?" Julia cried, and turned upon me with scorn. "To
take up your abode in a little cut-throat hole like this and not to
take the commonest precaution!"

She flew upstairs, then, and Mrs Ragg was in the room.

In order to obey my sister's injunction to keep the woman's attention I
began to talk to her, asking her how long she had lived in Sea-Strand
Cottage. I had just gathered from her grudging, mumbling speech that
she had lived there since the cottage was built, when my sister was in
the room again.

Julia watched the caretaker shovel the things on to the tray, and,
sighing bitterly the while, drag wearily out of the room with them. She
turned to me, then, with a nod eloquent.

"Locked," she enunciated. "The door was locked. Why--why should the
woman want to lock her bedroom door when she is out of it?"

"She returns the compliment you have paid her, and thinks you not to be
trusted," I suggested.

"If I have to climb on the roof and pull off the tiles, I'll see what
is in that room before I go to bed tonight!" Julia declared.

Then Mrs Ragg came back for the tablecloth.

"I slept very badly last night, Mrs Ragg," said Julia.

Mrs Ragg sucked in her cheeks, sighed heavily, made no answer.

"And so did you, I'm afraid. You were very restless. You walked about
half the night."

"Me, miss?" She had folded the cloth, but she dropped it from her
shaking, awkward hands, stooped to recover it, dropped it again.
"Begging your pardon, no, miss."

"Who, then?" Julia asked inflexibly.

The woman turned away with the cloth and shuffled hastily to the door.

"Wait," commanded Julia. "Who, then? There was no one else in your
bedroom besides you, I suppose?"

Mrs Ragg hurriedly rejected the insinuation. She had had a pain in her
chest, she remembered now, and had got up for remedies.

"Of course you heard me rapping on the wall and asking you to keep
sti