"Perhaps it is," she answered innocently. "What do you think, George?"
"I think the story-telling might as well begin at once," he said stiffly.
A few minutes later all lights were turned out. The score of young people had settled themselves about the room in comfortable attitudes, some on chairs and sofas, some on cushions on the floor, while in the midst of them sat the narrator, a girl of eighteen, who affected a deep morbidity. Gazing into the fire, she began her tale as though she were in a trance.
Carson sulkily picked his way after Polly toward a seat beside the hearth. Just as he was reaching it, he tripped over something bulky.
"Why, that's my log!" exclaimed Mrs. Whoffin, from the back of the room. "Dear! dear! Why hasn't anyone put it on the fire?" The story waited while Mrs. Whoffin scurried forward and personally supervised the placing of the log upon the andirons, and then sat down beside the hearth opposite Polly.
"Do go on!" cried several voices. "You stopped in the most exciting part."
The narrator, looking daggers at Mrs. Whoffin, paused long enough to show that she didn't have to go on unless she wanted to, and then resumed her tale:
"Suddenly, as he lay there in the haunted room, on the very bed where the old man had been murdered, he felt an invisible hand on the bedclothes."
Mrs. Whoffin shuddered, and a large black ant peered out of a hole in the log to see what was going on.
"Then he felt a second hand more terrifying than the first."