But the Mystery shook her head. “No, you don’t know, dear lady. Nobody knows. I’ve never told you the real big trouble—I couldn’t. Good-night.”
To Betty the Mystery continued cold and forbidding, and Betty wisely decided to leave her to Mrs. Post.
“There are people I don’t especially like,” she reflected, “and of course there are people who don’t like me. The Mystery is evidently one of them. I must write Jim and tell him what a hit his tower room makes with her, even if I can’t get near her.”
CHAPTER X
GHOSTS AND INSPIRATIONS
One snowy afternoon in December Dorothy, looking like a snowbird in her gray coat powdered with big white flakes, flitted into Betty’s room and without giving her sister a chance to say “How do you do?” burst out with her great news.
“There’s such an excitement at school. Miss Dick just laughs, but Kitty Carson thinks it was burglars, and we girls all think it was a ghost.”
“Goodness, what a beautiful excitement!” laughed Betty. “Tell me all about it.”
“Well, you see Shirley Ware heard it first,” explained Dorothy, “and she was so scared that she tried to scream. And all that came out was a kind of a choke. It woke me up and then I heard it too—the other noise, I mean. It was a queer little scratching and knocking on the wall.”
“Mice, you silly child,” put in Betty wisely.
But Dorothy scorned such a theory. “I guess I know how mice sound, after all I heard this summer, scurrying and hurrying inside our cottage walls. Besides, mice don’t groan, Betty Wales. The next thing we heard was a groan—an awfully sad sound, you know, Betty. It scared me so that I tried to scream too, and the other two girls woke up. They said I only made a little squeak,” explained the Smallest Sister proudly, “and of course if I had really screamed Kitty Carson would have heard, for all she sleeps so sound.”