The uncertainty of this got upon the girl’s nerves. Somebody might be creeping downstairs. Suppose it were Barnabetta?
“What would she go down again for?” Agnes asked herself.
Yet even as she thought this and how ridiculous it was, she crept out of bed. Ruth was sound asleep. Nobody heard Agnes as she felt around with her bare feet and got them into her fleece-lined bedroom slippers. Then, wrapping her robe about her, she tied the cord and found her bedroom candle.
She lit this and went out into the hall, the door being open. As she came noiselessly to the top of the main stairway she saw the reflection of another candle on the ceiling above the stairwell—a bobbing reflection that showed somebody was moving slowly down the lower flight.
Agnes, not daring to breathe audibly, shielded her own light with her free hand, and hastened to peer over the balustrade.
CHAPTER XIX—THE KEY TO THE CLOSET
Agnes was too late to see who it was at the foot of the front stairs. As she craned her head over the railing guarding the gallery above, the person with the candle went into the dining room.
This mysterious individual must have found the door open. There was no clicking of a latch down there. The figure had glided into the room with the candle, and was immediately out of sight.
“Just as silent as a ghost!” breathed Agnes. “Oh!”
She almost giggled aloud, for she remembered the time when—oh! so very long ago—the Corner House family had been troubled by a ghost in the garret—or, as Dot seemed determined to call it, “a goat.”