Arabella, with her hands folded in front of her, looked at them all with a calm, indifferent expression upon her face. She did not trouble to answer any of their kind inquiries. She seemed neither surprized nor embarrassed to find them there.

“Where in the world have you been?” demanded Strange.

“Walking,” she said. Her voice was just as it had always been.

“Walking! Arabella, are you quite mad? In three feet of snow? Where?”

“In the dark woods,” she said, “among my soft-sleeping brothers and sisters. Across the high moors among the sweet-scented ghosts of my brothers and sisters long dead. Under the grey sky through the dreams and murmurs of my brothers and sisters yet to come.”

Strange stared at her. “What?”

With such gentle questioning as this to encourage her, it surprized no one that she said no more and at least one of the ladies began to think that it was her husband’s harshness that made her so quiet and made her answer in such odd strain.

Mrs Ayrton put her arm around Arabella and gently turned her towards the stairs. “Mrs Strange is tired,” she said firmly. “Come, my dear, let you and I go up to …”

“Oh, no!” declared Strange. “Not yet! I wish to know where that gown came from. I beg your pardon, Mrs Ayrton, but I am quite determined to …”

He advanced towards them, but then stopt suddenly and stared down at the floor in puzzlement. Then he carefully stepped out of the way of something. “Jeremy! Where did this water come from? Just where Mrs Strange was standing.”

Jeremy Johns brought a candelabra to the foot of the stairs. There was a large pool. Then he and Strange peered at the ceiling and the walls. The other manservants became interested in the problem and so did the gentlemen.

While the men were thus distracted, Mrs Ayrton and the ladies led Arabella quietly away.

The hall at Ashfair was as old-fashioned as the rest of the house. It was panelled in cream-painted elmwood. The floor was well-swept stone flags. One of the manservants thought that the water must have seeped up from under the stones and so he went and fetched an iron rod to poke about at them to prove that one of them was loose. But he could not make them move. Nowhere was there any sign of where the water could have crept in. Someone else thought that perhaps Captain Ayrton’s two dogs might have shed the water. The dogs were carefully examined. They were not in the least wet.

Finally they examined the water itself.

“It is black and there are tiny scraps of something in it,” pointed out Strange.

“It looks like moss,” said Jeremy Johns.

They continued to wonder and exclaim for some time until a complete lack of any success obliged them to abandon the matter. Shortly afterwards the gentlemen left, taking their wives with them.

At five o’clock Janet Hughes went up to her mistress’s bedchamber and found her lying upon the bed. She had not even troubled to take off the black dress. When Janet asked her if she felt unwell, Arabella replied that she had a pain in her hands. So Janet helped her mistress undress and then went and told Strange.