"You had better have some tea," said Grace decisively. "It will do you good. I will fetch you up some presently. Rose, there is the breakfast bell."
Rose, with a parting nod to Agnes, went off, very much disappointed, and in high dudgeon with Doctor Frank for not letting her cross-examine the seamstress on the subject of the ghost.
"The ghost she saw must have been Mr. Richards returning from his midnight stroll," thought Rose, shrewdly. "My opinion is, he is the only ghost in Danton Hall."
There was very little allusion made to the affair of last night, at the breakfast-table. It seemed to be tacitly understood that the subject was disagreeable; and beyond an inquiry of the Doctor, "How is your patient this morning?" nothing was said. But all felt vaguely there was some mystery. Doctor Frank's theory of optical illusion satisfied no one—there was something at the bottom that they did not understand.
The stormy day grew stormier as it wore on. Rose sat down at the drawing-room piano after breakfast, and tried to while away the forlorn morning with music. Kate was there, trying to work off a bad headache with a complicated piece of embroidery and a conversation with Mr. Reginald Stanford. That gentleman sat on an ottoman at her feet, sorting silks, and beads, and Berlin wool, and Rose was above casting even a glance at them. Captain Danton, Sir Ronald, and the Doctor were playing billiards at the other end of the rambling old house. And upstairs poor Agnes Darling tossed feverishly on her hot pillow, and moaned, and slept fitfully, and murmured a name in her troubled sleep, and Grace watching her, and listening, heard the name "Harry."
Some of the gloom of the wretched day seemed to play on Rose's spirits. She sang all the melancholy songs she knew, in a mournful, minor key, until the conversation of the other two ceased, and they felt as dismal as herself.
"Rose, don't!" Kate cried out in desperation at length. "Your songs are enough to give one the horrors. Here is Reginald with a face as gloomy as the day."
Rose got up in displeased silence, closed the piano, and walked to the door.
"Pray don't!" said Stanford; "don't leave us. Kate and I have nothing more to say to one another, and I have a thousand things to say to you."
"You must defer them, I fear," replied Rose. "Kate will raise your spirits with more enlivening music when I am gone."