Beatrice gave a feeble smile of recognition, and then gazed vacantly around the apartment, unable at first to recall what had preceded the present state of affairs.
The room presented a scene of confusion. All the pictures hung awry: the ornaments of the mantel had fallen, and lay, some shattered to pieces, within the fireplace: fragments of one of the gasalier globes starred the carpet: the doors of the bookcase were open, and many of the volumes had been projected from their shelves to the floor. On the table was the Viking's skull, the cause, in some mysterious way, of all this disorder; at least, such was Beatrice's opinion.
"I have been horribly frightened!" she said, as soon as she had recovered the use of speech.
"And well you might be!" replied Idris. "Godfrey and I had just reached the door, when the house shook to its foundations, and out went all the lights. By heaven! I thought the place was coming down. We have had an earthquake shock."
But the imaginative mind of Beatrice, still under the spell of "The Fair Orientalist," was not prepared to accept this rational explanation.
"Earthquakes don't happen in England," she declared.
"Slight shocks occasionally occur here," said Idris, "and the present one is a case in point. Why," he added, observing Beatrice's dissentient shake of her head, "what else could it have been?"
"I cannot say," she answered, shivering, and glancing at the Viking's skull. "But this much I know, that long before the house shook and the gas went out, I was frightened by strange sounds coming from the head of the staircase where the skull was, and so—and so——"
And here Beatrice paused, not knowing how to express to others that which was not very clear to herself.
"And so you began to think that the skull was talking and threatening you with mystic oracles? Fie, Trixie," said her brother, reprovingly. "I did not think you could be so foolish."