"She must have mixed me up with somebody else," was my final comment. "No doubt many people have queer experiences there, and she might naturally make such a mistake."
"Well, I gave her your address, and she is writing to ask you to have tea with her at the club, so you and she can fight it out there," he said; and the conversation drifted into other channels.
Next afternoon I met Mrs Kent at her club, and before leaving, fortunately remembered the curious mistake about the skeletons I had "spotted."
"But you did 'spot' them," she said, laughing. "Don't you remember my asking you if you had noticed anything curious, or heard or seen anything, during your visit? At first you said 'Thank goodness, no!' But immediately afterwards you put your hand on a particular part of the circular hall, and said: 'There is something uncanny just here—something I don't like.'"
"Yes; I remember all that. But what of it? You never told me anything about skeletons."
"Of course not—you were not in a condition of health to discuss such eerie questions just then. All the same, you had located the exact spot where only a week before your visit, my husband's agent told him that two skeletons had been found bricked up!"
She then explained that the agent had been on the estate for many years, even before the death of the late owner of Rush—her father-in-law. Having some business with her husband the week before my arrival, this agent had casually mentioned that he and the former owner had found these skeletons in the very spot indicated by me, about forty years previously, and, strange to relate, had bricked them up again instead of burying them. This last fact may account in part at least for the spooky reputation of Castle Rush.
All good psychics know that nothing disturbs a spirit so much as any informality about his funeral arrangements!
To return to my visit to Castle Rush.
Some years previously I had met, on an Orient steamer sailing from Ceylon to Naples, a brother of the owner of Rush. He was a sailor, and as hard-headed and practical a man as it has ever been my lot to meet. It was in no way through meeting him that my visit to Rush came about, but owing to my acquaintance with Mrs Kent and her family.