“When do you expect him home?” asked Thomas Godolphin.
“I never expect him until he comes,” replied Mrs. Verrall. “London seems to possess attractions for him. Once up there, he may stay a day, or he may stay fifty. I never know.”
Cecil went upstairs to put her things on when tea was over, the maid attending her. Mrs. Verrall turned to see that the door was closed, and then spoke abruptly.
“Mr. Godolphin, can anything be done to prevent the wind whistling as it does in these passages?”
“Does it whistle?” he replied.
“The last few nights it has whistled—oh, I cannot describe it to you! If I were not a good sleeper, it would have kept me awake all night. I wish it could be stopped.”
“It cannot be done, I believe, without pulling the house down,” he said. “My mother had a great dislike to hear it, and a good deal of expense was incurred in trying to remedy it; but it did little or no good.”
“What puzzles me is, that the wind should have been whistling within the house, when there’s no wind whistling without. The weather has been quite calm. Sometimes when it is actually blowing great guns we cannot hear it at all.”
“Something peculiar in the construction of the passages,” he carelessly remarked. “You hear the whistling or not, according to the quarter from which the wind may happen to be blowing.”
“The servants tell a tale—these old Ashlydyat retainers who remain in the house—that this strangely-sounding wind is connected with the Ashlydyat superstition, and foretells ill to the Godolphins.”