“Then—show me the rooms upstairs.”
We ascended the shallow oak steps, and passed first into the apartment in which my grandmother had died.
It had been done up since then, refurnished, and almost completely altered. Only the wide fireplace, with its brass dogs and its heavy oaken mantelpiece, had been left untouched.
Margot glanced hastily round. Then she walked up to the fireplace, and drew a long breath.
“There ought to be a fire here,” she said.
“But it is summer,” I answered, wondering.
“And a chair there,” she went on, in a curious low voice, indicating—I think now, or is it my imagination?—the very spot where my grandmother was wont to sit. “Yes—I seem to remember, and yet not to remember.”
She looked at me, and her white brows were knit.
Suddenly she said: “Ronald, I don’t think I like this room. There is something—I don’t know—I don’t think I could sit here; and I seem to remember—something about it, as I did about the terrace. What can it mean?”
“It means that you are tired and overexcited, darling. Your nerves are too highly strung, and nerves play us strange tricks. Come to your own room and take off your things, and when you have had some tea, you will be all right again.”
Yes, I was fool enough to believe that tea was the panacea for an undreamed-of, a then unimaginable, evil.
I thought Margot was simply an overtired and imaginative child that evening. If I could believe so now!
We went up into her boudoir and had tea, and she grew more like herself; but several times that night I observed her looking puzzled and thoughtful, and a certain expression of anxiety shone in her blue eyes that was new to them then.
But I thought nothing of it, and I was-happy. Two or three days passed, and Mar-got did not again refer to her curious sensation of pre-knowledge of the house and garden. I fancied there was a slight alteration in her manner; that
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