"Father's told me about the case," she said. "I couldn't keep away, because you're so hard-headed, Jim."
Smiling whimsically, she glanced at his frayed watch ribbon.
"I see you haven't found the answer yet. Tell me everything you have learned while you have been torturing that poor ribbon."
"Ghosts or not, Nora," he answered, "the house isn't healthy, and I'd rather you didn't stay."
She laughed and walked in. Shrugging his shoulders, he followed her, closed the door, and told her what had happened since he had telephoned the inspector. Her face, he noticed, had grown pale, and a troubled look had entered her eyes. She shivered.
"What an uncomfortable place! I can guess what Clara meant. Don't you get an impression of great suffering, Jim?"
He was familiar with her superstitious sensibility which at times seemed nearly psychic. It irritated him that to his own matter-of-fact mind the house had from the first conveyed a sense of unhealth. As he started to laugh at her, Nora with a quick movement shrank against the wall.
"What's that?" she whispered.
Garth strained forward, listening, too. He had heard what Clara had described, a crying, smothered and scarcely audible, and he knew what the girl had meant when she had spoken of a voice from the grave—a dead voice.
Across the moaning cut a shrill feminine scream.