“I’m afraid I can’t afford to overlook it. The day Mr. Shenstone was here and I learned—learned of his brother’s death,” pursued Aunt Effie with difficulty, “I decided that it would be better for the child—healthier— if she was not allowed to enter the room again.”

“If I might say so, I think you’re going the wrong way about it to try and force Miss Sabrina in this thing,” said the housekeeper astonishingly, so that Aunt Effie glanced up at her over her spectacles, needle poised. “It will only drive her into herself.”

“She’s at such a trying age,” sighed Aunt Effie, her assumed self-confidence ebbing visibly. “It’s hard to know what to do.”

“Then I’d say it was safer to let her alone. It won’t do to make too much of it.”

“But I don’t feel it’s natural!” cried Aunt Effie, and was uncomfortably aware of a brief flicker in the woman’s eyes. “Do you?” she insisted, leaning forward in her eagerness for the answer.

“That’s hard to say,” Mrs. Pilton said cautiously. “It might be.”

“Mrs. Pilton—have you ever felt there’s something— well, something strange about this house lately?” Her taut nerves gave way under the housekeeper’s habitual slowness to answer a question she did not like. “You have noticed something! So has Bella! So have I!”

“Most houses have something strange about them, one way or another,” was all Mrs. Pilton would say to that.

“Then you admit there is something! Do you know what it is?”

Again the answer was too long in coming.

“You must tell me,” Aunt Effie implored. “Have you seen anything?”

“No.”

“I know what you mean,” she nodded. “It opens doors—and yet It isn’t there! Bella and I met It on the stairs. Bella was terrified.”

“It’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Pilton, and it was almost as though she had smiled.

Aunt Effie stared at her anxiously, her needlework for gotten.

“But how do you know that? What is It?”

“It might be someone who once lived in the house— and has come home again,” the woman replied simply, but Aunt Effie rose from her chair with a little cry of comprehension and horror.

“The one who was killed in India! His own brother said there was something queer about his room at the club. But this is awful!” cried Aunt Effie. “I must take her away at once!”

“It might be better just to let things take their course.”

“You can’t seriously stand there and tell me I should do nothing to save my niece from this—Thing?”

“There’s no harm in him.”

“What does It want, then?”

Again the woman’s impregnable, self-possessed silence fell between them, and Aunt Effie shuddered.