"A sure sign there were spirits in the house."
"Wasn't it? But why, do you think, does she beckon people?"
"Perhaps she beckons people to show them where the jewels are hidden."
"Oh!" cried Fanny; "why did we never think of that before? Of course that is the reason—and they are worth two hundred thousand pounds. We must have the panels in the corridor taken down. I'll make father do it to-morrow. Two hundred thousand pounds: what is that a year?"
"Ten thousand."
"Fancy father with ten thousand a year!" Mr Bevan shuddered. "We can have a steam yacht, and everything we want. I feel as if I were going mad," said Miss Lambert, with the air of a person who had often been mad before and knew the symptoms.
The door opened and Susannah appeared with the punch things. "Susannah, guess what's happened—never mind, you'll know soon. Have you got the lemon and the sugar? That is right."
And Miss Lambert, forgetting for a moment fortune, turned her attention to the manufacturing of punch.
Susannah withdrew, casting her eyes over Fanny and Charles as she went, and seeming to draw her under-lip after her.
When the door was shut, Miss Lambert looked into the punch bowl to see if it was clean, and, having turned a huge spider out of it, went to the sideboard.