"I tell you you will all be off on Miss Dorothy's broomstick one of these fine days," growled Bob. "She is a witch, and she has already bewitched you, for you can talk of nothing but England now."
"You had better go to bed, Eustace," Mrs. Orban said with a laugh. "Bob is getting quite fierce."
Bob left very early next day to get back to work. As Nesta and Peter were having holidays, Eustace, of course, did no lessons, but spent the day very contentedly helping his mother. She was busy rearranging furniture in the room that was to be Miss Chase's, and they scarcely sat down the whole day till evening.
"Early to bed this night, my son," said Mrs. Orban as they left the dinner-table. "I expect you will sleep like a top."
He was looking sleepy already, and a quarter of an hour later went very readily to his room, with a parting entreaty to his mother that she would not sit up late.
"Not I," was the laughing rejoinder. "I promise you I will only write one little line to father and begin my mail letter to grannie, and then I will go to bed."
This Mrs. Orban did, and being very tired she fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.
For several hours a great silence reigned over the house; but even when it was broken by the soft pad-pad-pad of bare feet creeping stealthily round the veranda, the sleepers lay utterly unconscious. The stairs had not creaked under the weight of this figure; it cast no shadows, for there was no light either within the house or without. At every window it halted, listened, peered in, as if it had the eyes of a cat to see with in the dark.
First came the dining-room, and next it the room in which Eustace and Peter slept. Round the corner were Mrs. Orban's room and part of the drawing-room. At the other corner was Nesta's room, where Miss Chase would also sleep, and next to that the servants' room.
The strange visitor made a complete tour of the veranda and reached the stair again.