"Well?"
"I dreamt there was a dead woman in it."
I laughed at that, and Julia, pausing in the act of taking a bite from her toast, glared angrily at me.
"You are a nice, soothing sort of person to be sent away with one supposed to be in want of cheering influences!" I said. "You and your dream of a dead woman!"
"I dreamt one was there," Julia said, going on with her toast. "In my opinion one was there," she added, doggedly.
When she had finished her breakfast, and had withdrawn her thoughts from the engrossing subject of her dream sufficiently to grumble about the aching void where the chops should have been, she sprang up from the table and loudly tinkled the little bell.
"For Mrs Ragg to clear away," she explained to me. "While she is doing so, and you, Isabella, keep her attention engaged on things below, I am going upstairs to have a look at her bedroom."
"Absurd!" I ejaculated.
"Aren't you absurd?" Julia cried, and turned upon me with scorn. "To take up your abode in a little cut-throat hole like this and not to take the commonest precaution!"
She flew upstairs, then, and Mrs Ragg was in the room.