t me by way of answer.

"We were told two men were here this morning. This is a very lonely
situation, Mrs Ragg. I suppose you would admit no one you don't know
all about?"

She was, she said, always most particular.

"Then, who were these two men, and what were they doing here?"

She did not know.

"Two men here, Mrs Ragg, and you not know it?"

"They weren't here," she said; and I had to leave it so.

I offered to change beds with Julia that night, but she would not hear
of it. "Your room is the more comfortable; keep it," she said. "While
you insist on staying here at the peril of our lives, I will sleep as
well as I can with a dead woman laid forth on the bed next mine, and
two murderers shut up in the shed across the way."

Julia's talk is ever more extravagant even than her notions, but it was
of a disquieting kind. Many of the absurd things she had said in the
day recurred to me in the night, assuming a quite different value. So
that, although I had longed for bed, I found myself, arrived there,
quite disinclined for sleep.

Surreptitiously I watched the caretaker up to bed. She came upstairs,
clinging to the balusters for support, a tired, worn-looking, elderly
woman, with a lank, frail body, and a care-lined, miserable face. How
ridiculous were Julia's suspicions! She not only did not lock her door
to-night, but left it ajar. At intervals I peeped through mine to see
if her light was extinguished; she had not--so poorly dressed she
was--the appearance of one who would indulge in the extravagance of a
candle burning all night. Yet, long after I knew by the creaking of the
spring mattress Mrs Ragg had lain down, I saw the streak of light
shining through the unclosed door.

Fears of fire were added to my other disquietudes. Standing on the
landing, I was hesitating if to knock at her door, and remind her she
had not put out her light, when I was conscious of a movement behind
me. Starting round with a muffled cry, I encountered a tall white
figure, which, with an answering cry, grabbed me by both shoulders.

"What _are_ you doing here, Isabella?"

"How _could_ you frighten me so, Julia!"

We clung together and scolded each other for a minute, then each
returned to her own room. But I not to sleep. Listening acutely for
every sound, yet shrinking from every sound as it came, I tossed and
turned with wide-open, feverish eyes. Suspicious circumstances at which
I had been disposed to laugh in the day,