Geoffrey and Alfred, the two youngest footmen, were tormented by the sound of the fife and violin which Geoffrey had first heard on the night of the dinner-party. The music always appeared to come from the next room. Stephen had taken them all over the house and proved that nowhere was any one playing any such instruments, but it did no good; they continued afraid and unhappy.

Most bewildering of all, in Stephen’s opinion, was the behaviour of Robert, the eldest footman. Robert had struck Stephen from the first as a sensible man, conscientious, reliable – in short the last person in the world to fall prey to imaginary fears. Yet Robert still insisted that he could hear an invisible wood growing up around the house. Whenever he paused in his work, he heard ghostly branches scraping at the walls and tapping upon the windows, and tree-roots slyly extending themselves beneath the foundations and prising apart the bricks. The wood was old, said Robert, and full of malice. A traveller in the wood would have as much to fear from the trees as from another person hiding there.

But, argued Stephen, the nearest wood of any size was four miles away upon Hampstead Heath and even there the trees were quite domesticated. They did not crowd around people’s houses and try to destroy them. Stephen could say what he liked; Robert only shook his head and shivered.

Stephen’s only consolation was that this peculiar mania had erased all the servants’ other differences. The London servants no longer cared that the country servants were slow of speech and had old-fashioned manners. The country servants no longer complained to Stephen that the London servants played tricks upon them and sent them on imaginary errands. All the servants were united by the belief that the house was haunted. They sat in the kitchen after their work was done and told stories of all the other houses that they had ever heard of where there were ghosts and horrors, and of the horrible fates that had befallen the people who lived there.

One evening, about a fortnight after Lady Pole’s dinner-party, they were gathered about the kitchen fire, engaged in this favourite occupation. Stephen soon grew tired of listening to them and retired to his own little room to read a newspaper. He had not been there more than a few minutes when he heard a bell ringing. So he put down his newspaper, put on his black coat and went to see where he was wanted.

In the little passage-way that connected the kitchen to the butler’s room was a little row of bells and beneath the bells the names of various rooms were neatly inscribed in brown paint: The Venetian Drawing-room; The Yellow Drawing-room; The Dining-room; Lady Pole’s Sitting-room; Lady Pole’s Bed-chamber; Lady Pole’s Dressing-room; Sir Walter’s Study; Sir Walter’s Bed-chamber; Sir Walter’s Dressing-room; Lost-hope.

“Lost-hope?” thought Stephen. “What in the world is that?”

He had paid the carpenter that very morning for the work in putting up the bells and he had entered the amount in his account-book: To Amos Judd, for putting up 9 bells in the kitchen passageway and painting the names of the rooms beneath, 4 shillings. But now there were ten bells. And the bell for Lost-hope was ringing violently.