“Only, Gervais, it couldn’t have been him after all; you see you’re not a relation of his.”
“No, but I didn’t know that. I’ll try to think that it was the wind, or the owls, or anything.”
“And that you were not quite well, and that made you more fanciful; you see you had been dreaming already in a fanciful way.”
“Yes,” said Jerry, though his tone was only half convinced.
“And now don’t you think you can manage to go to sleep? Get into bed, and I’ll sit here beside you. I will leave the candle alight, and I will make up the fire so that it shall last till morning. It is near morning now, I fancy.”
“Thank you, awfully,” said Jerry. “Yes, I’ll try to go to sleep. I don’t like you to have to sit up like that; as soon as I’m at all asleep, please go. I have a feeling that I won’t hear any more noises now.—Oh what a lot I shall have to tell Charlotte about how awfully good she is,” he said to himself. And he lay perfectly still and tried to breathe regularly so that Claudia should think he was asleep, and as sometimes happens, the simulation brought the reality. In ten minutes he was really and truly in a deep and peaceful slumber.
Then Claudia went quietly back to her own room. All was perfectly still up the stair leading to the tower, but a strange, puzzled, half-sad feeling crept over the girl.
“It really seems as if there were something in that old story,” she thought. “Why should that poor little fellow be so impressed by it? I can’t understand his father’s having heard it too. And Gervais said his father used to stay here as a boy. How could that have been? I wonder if it can have anything to do with Aunt Mildred’s prejudice against the Waldrons—for I am sure she is a little prejudiced against them.”
But Claudia was too tired and sleepy to pursue her reflections further, and her slumbers till the next morning were dreamless and undisturbed.
The little guest was fast asleep when Mrs Ball went to look after him.