“She’s all right,” she said.
“But she screamed, Tish! She screamed horribly.”
“You’ve heard her scream before this,” she said coldly. “She says she saw a ghost. That’s all.”
She went out again, and to her own room. She was very lame, we noticed, but calm. Some time later she called to Aggie to bring her the arnica, and Aggie did so. She reported that Tish had lost the strange pallor, but that she had got a number of thorns in her feet and was removing them.
“She’s very quiet, Lizzie,” Aggie said. “And I think she’s sprained her ankle. You would think she had seen the ghost, to look at her, and not Emmie.”
Well, I felt uneasy myself, especially as something had certainly locked us in, and after a while I went across to Emmie’s room and tapped lightly at the door. It was Tish herself who answered from the other side.
“Get away from there, Lizzie,” she said sharply. “We are all right. I shall stay with Emmie until she is calmer.”
The rest of the night was quiet enough. It was not until the next day that certain things began to make us uneasy.
One of these was Emmie herself. However lightly Tish might treat the matter, refusing to call a doctor and so on, it was evident that Emmie had passed through a terrible experience.
She would not see anyone, even Aggie or myself, and she insisted on keeping her door closed and locked. Once in a while we could hear Tish reading to her, apparently to calm her. And she ate a little from the trays Tish carried up. But never once did she raise her voice; ordinarily when she wanted anything and no one answered her bell one could hear her shouting, from the main road. But she was apparently chastened beyond belief.