“Yes, but I dare say there is,” he insisted. “You know, it was used to be said that Charles the Second hid in this house after Worcester. Ned says that’s all fudge, and he was never within ten miles of Highnoons, but only fancy if it were so!”
“Only fancy!” echoed Elinor in a hollow tone.
Nicky jumped to his feet and began to walk round the room inspecting the walls. “I dare say there may be a sliding panel somewhere, just as I saw in some old house or another, with a passage into the garden.”
“It is not in this room,” said Elinor firmly. “He did not enter here—and I wish you will not talk in such a way! I shall not sleep a wink all night!”
“No, indeed! I should think you would not!” Nicky agreed. “We must find it, of course! By Jove, this is capital sport!”
Nothing would do for him but to be allowed to search the house. Elinor went with him, torn between amusement at his enthusiasm and a horrid fear that he might indeed discover a hidden door. The dog Bouncer accompanied them, hopeful of rats, but presently grew disgusted with the lack of sport and lay down, yawning cavernously. Nicky tapped all the paneling in the ground-floor rooms without producing the hollow note he so ardently desired to hear, and Elinor was just beginning to breathe again when he insisted on going upstairs. She felt that it was unlikely that a secret way into the house should be found in any of the bedrooms, but Nicky said he had seen one that started from a cheese room at the very top of a house.
“Good God, there is a large loft here which was very likely used as a cheese room in former times!” Elinor cried, quite aghast.
“Is there, by Jupiter?” Nicky exclaimed. “I’ll go up there this instant!”
She did not accompany him, and he presently reappeared, slightly cast down at having been unable to discover even as much as a priest’s hole in the cheese room. He put Elinor so forcibly in mind of the schoolboy brothers of several of her late pupils that she very soon abandoned all formality with him, an arrangement which seemed to suit him very well. His conviction that the large cupboard built into the wall of her bedchamber was just the place where one might reasonably expect to find a hidden trap door provoked her into apostrophizing him as an odious boy, a form of address to which he seemed to be accustomed, for he grinned and said, “I know, but what sport if it were so, Cousin Elinor! Only consider!”
“I am considering it,” she said. “And let me tell you, Nicky, that if you are trying to make my flesh creep you are wasting your time. Recollect that I have been a governess, and governesses, you know, have no romantic notions and seldom indulge themselves with swooning or the vapors!”