"You don't like him, Aunt Lavvy."
"No, Mary, I do not. And I don't know anybody who does."
"I like him," Mary said.
Aunt Lavvy looked as if she hadn't heard. "I oughtn't to have let you see
Aunt Charlotte."
V.
Mary woke up suddenly. It was her third night in the spare room at Five
Elms.
She had dreamed that she saw Aunt Charlotte standing at the foot of the basement stairs, by the cat's cupboard where the kittens were born, taking her clothes off and hiding them. She had seen that before. When she was six years old. She didn't know whether she had been dreaming about something that had really happened, or about a dream. Only, this time, she saw Aunt Charlotte open her mouth and scream. The scream woke her.
She remembered her mother and Aunt Bertha in the drawing-room, talking, their faces together. That wasn't a dream.
There was a sound of feet overhead. Uncle Victor's room. A sound of a door opening and shutting. And then a scream, muffled by the shut door. Her heart checked; turned sickeningly. She hadn't dreamed that.
Uncle Victor shouted down the stair to Dan. She could hear Dan's feet in the next room and his door opening.