“Fancy!” said Martha, with an emphatic sniff. “It’s all stuff, and nonsense. No such thing could have happened. It was all because you went up in the dark.”
From feeling startled, and in dread of his secret being known, a rapid change came over Waller; half-suspecting what must have occurred, and finding it covered by the girl’s superstitious notions, added to which there were the feathers, the sneezes, and the cook’s blessings upon his Majesty King George the Third, the boy’s risible faculties were so bestirred that he burst into a roar of laughter.
The effect was almost magical. Bella, who had been lying stretched out upon her back, tapping the floor with her heels occasionally in her paroxysms, suddenly started bolt upright, to exclaim in an indignant voice—
“Yes, it’s all very fine for you to laugh, Master Waller!”
“Well, who wouldn’t laugh at such nonsense?” said the boy.
“But it isn’t nonsense, nor it isn’t stuff, cook. You may laugh, sir, but there’s something walks up and down there in the dead of the night, and I heard it only last night, too, and told cook.”
Martha Gusset slowly bent her head by way of acquiescence, and made as if to throw the goose-wing, with which she had been fanning herself, behind the fire, but altered her mind, and put it on the chimneypiece with the bright brass candlesticks.
“Up and down where?” asked Waller.
“Oh, I don’t know, sir; but it was somewhere in the roof.”
“Bah!” cried Waller, contemptuously. “And pray what did cook say?” he went on, as he gave a glance at the comfortable-looking dame.