“Something strange must have happened,” said Vibert, when the three had left the apartment.
“I see no reason to think so,” said Bruce, who had resumed his seat by the table, and had taken up again the paper which he had dropped. “Emmie’s timidity is like a disease, a kind of waking nightmare, and it would be as idle to look for external cause for her terrors as it would be for those experienced in a bad dream. What could have been more unreasonable than her dread of occupying a bright pleasant room, because a gentleman had died of hydrophobia in the one next to it, and that fifty years ago!”
“And with such a good thick wall between the two apartments,” observed Vibert, who was standing with his back to the fire, “so that there is not so much as a key-hole through which ghost or goblin might creep.”
“I cannot say so much,” remarked Bruce; “there is a door of communication between the two rooms, though, by the way, the key-hole does not go right through it, for it can be opened but on one side.”
“A door of communication!” exclaimed Vibert. “I never knew that before.”
“Nor did I,” observed Bruce, “until the workmen from S—— had to move in my presence the large heavy press which had stood in that room for I know not how many years. As they were dragging it off to place it in the apartment prepared for poor dear Emmie, I noticed a key-hole in one of the panels which had hitherto been covered by the oak press. When the workmen had departed, I tried whether the key of the door which opens on the corridor would fit into this newly-discovered key-hole.”
“And did it fit it?” inquired Vibert eagerly.
“Exactly,” was his brother’s reply.
“Does any one but yourself know the secret of the door in the panel?” asked Vibert.
“No; nor do I care that the servants should know it, nor Emmie, who is sufficiently nervous already as to what regards the so-called haunted chamber. I have hung a large map over that part of the panel in which is the key-hole; and as the housemaid never ventures to move what I place on the walls, the fact of there being a door of communication between the two rooms is not likely to be discovered even by her.”