“It didn’t sound like any real person,” Helen explained slowly. “It was muffled and far away and choked—like a—why, like a ghost!”
“Exactly,” cried Madeline triumphantly. “Babe, don’t you see what’s happened? One of the highly advertised features of your domicile has come to light. Your respected father-in-law, realizing that no castle is complete without a ghost—he remembered Babbie’s, probably—built in one, warranted to appear to persons sitting alone in the firelight. And you try to pretend it’s only a parlor-maid in distress.”
“I hope it wasn’t Betty in distress,” put in Eleanor Watson.
“I’m really afraid she’s locked in somewhere,” said Babe anxiously. “Didn’t a girl in an old story once hide in a chest in a game like this, and get faint and finally smother? Did the noise sound as if it could have been Betty, Helen?”
Helen confessed that it might have been almost anything.
“Thomas,” Babe turned to the butler, “will you please take two of the servants and hunt in the cellar for Miss Wales? I’ll take the up-stairs rooms, and John, you and the men hunt down here, and then go up to the attic. Open all the chests and cupboards. Oh, dear, I wish this house wasn’t so big!”
Search “up-stairs, down-stairs, and in my lady’s chamber” revealed no Betty. Eleanor, passing the door of the yellow drawing-room, thought she heard another cry, but when, reinforced by Dick and John, she went in to listen for its repetition, all was still. Nobody was under the furniture or in the next room, and the open fires in both rooms made the chimney an impossible retreat. But it was from near the chimney that Eleanor thought the cry had come, and Helen had been sitting near the fire when it sounded in her ear.
“She must be in one of the secret chambers that Mr. Morton broadly hinted at,” said Madeline finally. “But why, if she went in, doesn’t she come out?”
Jim Watson had been frenziedly active in searching chests and cupboards. Now he was knocking on the wall near the fireplace and running back and forth between the two adjoining rooms, taking note of the position and thickness of the partitions.
“There’s a passage between these rooms,” he announced at last, “and a shaft or a staircase or something running up in this corner. See—there’s a square taken out. But how you get in, I can’t see.”