rbury, "not really!"

"Really and unmistakably!"

"Was it an oldish man in the dress of about fifty years ago?" asked Mrs.
Norbury hopefully.

"Nothing of the sort," said Ada; "it was a white hedgehog."

"A white hedgehog!" exclaimed both the Norburys, in tones of disconcerted
astonishment.

"A huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes," said Ada; "I was lying
half asleep in bed when suddenly I felt a sensation as of something
sinister and unaccountable passing through the room. I sat up and looked
round, and there, under the window, I saw an evil, creeping thing, a sort
of monstrous hedgehog, of a dirty white colour, with black, loathsome
claws that clicked and scraped along the floor, and narrow, yellow eyes
of indescribable evil. It slithered along for a yard or two, always
looking at me with its cruel, hideous eyes, then, when it reached the
second window, which was open it clambered up the sill and vanished. I
got up at once and went to the window; there wasn't a sign of it
anywhere. Of course, I knew it must be something from another world, but
it was not till I turned up Popple's chapter on local traditions that I
realised what I had seen."

She turned eagerly to the large brown volume and read: "'Nicholas
Herison, an old miser, was hung at Batchford in 1763 for the murder of a
farm lad who had accidentally discovered his secret hoard. His ghost is
supposed to traverse the countryside, appearing sometimes as a white owl,
sometimes as a huge white hedgehog."

"I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that made you _think_
you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake," said Mrs. Norbury,
hazarding a conjecture that probably came very near the truth.

Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her apparition.

"This must be hushed up," said Mrs. Norbury quickly; "the servants--"

"Hushed up!" exclaimed Ada, indignantly; "I'm writing a long report on it
for the Research Society."

It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of brilliant
resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his life.

"It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek," he said, "but it would be a shame
to let it go further. That white hedgehog is an old joke of ours;
stuffed albino hedgehog, you know, that my father brought home from
Jamaica, where they grow to enormous size. We hide it in the room with a
string on it, run one end of the string through the window; then we pull
if from bel