“What awful fun you could have playing horrible games like hide and seek up here,” he said. “I hope you do. Lord, what’s that groan? Oh, a cistern, is it? I thought it must be a ghost. How ripping!”
David instantly dismissed his resolution of not playing games here any more.
“Oh, there’s a worse room yet,” he said. “Do come and look at it. There’s a box like a coffin in it. Margery and I used to play gorgeous games up here, dressing up and frightening each other, you know. Wasn’t it fun, Margery?”
Margery was the soul of loyalty. She would no more have reminded David that only to-day he had come to the conclusion that these games were silly than she would have had him led out to instant execution.
“Yes, when it begins to get dark it’s awful up here,” she said. “You can’t see anything distinctly, and the cistern suddenly groans, and you can’t tell what’s coming next!”
Maddox, in spite of his seventeen years and Olympian elevation, did not seem to be unbending. David, in fact, if his utterances this afternoon were to be taken literally, had to unbend to him.
“I love being frightened,” said Maddox. “You ought to read ghost stories to each other here, and the one who reads may make any sort of noise he chooses at any moment. Just when the ghost is going to appear, you know. Lord, I hope I shall never get beyond that sort of thing!”
He, Margery, and David were standing in a row opposite the coffin-shaped box. Just then the cistern in the room behind gave one of its best goblin-groans, and Maddox looked awfully round.
“Oh, what’s that?” he said. “That’s not the cistern. That’s a man bleeding to death in there, that is. His throat’s cut from ear to ear.”
“No,” said David. “I’m sure it was the cistern.”