“How did you sleep, Madeleine?” asked Horace. “Nothing disturbed you, I hope?”
“Why do you ask? I am not given to bad nights. I slept very well, except that I think one never sleeps quite as soundly the first night in a new place,” she replied.
“H’m-m!” murmured her brother, but there was a good deal of meaning in the inarticulate sound, and a decidedly mischievous sparkle in his eyes when she again addressed him and he was obliged to look up.
“Horace,” she said, “you have some reason or motive for asking how I slept! You must tell it to me. Are you only wanting to tease, or is there something that you’ve kept to yourself about this house? Is it supposed to be haunted?”
Mr Littlewood’s face put on an expression of preternatural gravity, but Madeleine knew him too well to be deceived by this.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I believe you are trying to invent something just to frighten me. I know your little ways of old. If there had been—” she hesitated.
“What?” asked her brother.
“I was going to say anything real,” she replied: “if there had been anything real of the kind, you would not have let us take the house, or rather Ryder Morion would not have done so without warning us.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t know,” said Horace mysteriously, with a shake of his head which expressed more than his words.
“Tell me at least what you know,” rejoined his sister, rather impatiently.