confirmed previous impressions or fears, shrugged again, made a little face between impatience, amusement, and misgiving, and gave the old-fashioned iron bell-pull a vigorous jerk.

Then came a long wait. But he did not ring again. The first fifteen of David’s thirty-one years had been spent here, within these grave old walls, and he knew exactly what was happening now inside.

The jerk on the brass-handled wire would set into convulsive motion one of a row of precariously balanced[5] bells far down in the enormous stone-floored kitchen. Most of these bells had not been rung for two generations at least. They were connected with the bedrooms and the study—it had been a long time since any resident of Wastewater had felt it necessary to summon a servant to bedrooms or study. In the row, David remembered, were also the front-door bell, dining-room bell, and the side-door bell. He began to wonder if the last were broken.

[5]

No, someone was coming. He could not possibly have heard steps behind that massive and impenetrable door, but he assuredly sensed a motion there, stirring, creaking, the distant bang of another door.

Then another wait, not so long. And at last the door was carefully opened by Hedda, who looked casually at him with squinting old white-lashed eyes, looked back in concern at her bars and bolts, closed the door behind him, and then said in a mild old voice in which traces of her Belgian origin lingered:

“Good. How is Mister David?”

“Splendid,” David answered, with a heartiness that the chill of the dark old hall already tinged with a certain familiar depression. “Where’s my aunt, Hedda?”

Hedda had been staring at him with a complacent, vacuous smile, like the slightly demented creature she really was. Now she roused herself just a shade and answered in a slightly reproachful voice:

“Where but upstairs shall she be?”

David remembered now that Gabrielle had long ago announced, with her precocious little-girl powers of observation, that “Hedda always tells us things the first[6] time as if it were the twentieth, and her patience quite worn out with telling us!” An affectionate half smile twitched the corners of David’s mouth as he thought of that old tawny-headed, rebellious little Gabrielle of ten years before, and he followed the smile with as sudden a sigh.

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