shut out the sun. It was curious, she thought, that none of the windows, even of the new buildings, overlooked it. It seemed chilly out there. Mrs. Bradley made a careful exploration, even parting continually the long weeds to make certain that the surface of the courtyard was everywhere the same. This examination yielded nothing.
She left the house before the caretaker returned to it. Then, later in the afternoon, she sought him out, and asked him one or two trivial questions before she put to him the important query suggested by her visit.
"What has become of the well-cover, I wonder?" she said, in the most casual tone she could command.
"Well-cover? It was covered with two planks last time I were here," he responded stupidly. "What do you mean about a well-cover?"
"I shouldn't have thought two planks would have been sufficient to cover so deep a well, and one which has the opening level with the ground," replied Mrs. Bradley. "But, of course, it's no business of mine. One thing, I see that you are able to keep the flap of the cellar staircase screwed down. That's something."
"If any of the visitors brings children, I keeps my eye on things," said the old man. "Anyway, this yere courtyard beant on the reg'lar routine. Nothing to see out here. I've give up most of the garden, too, I 'ave. Just keep the front a bit tidy. I thought maybe some of them it belonged to might pay a jobbing gardener to come in now and again. It's a mort of work for an old fellow like me, and I can't keep upsides with it nohow. Barring the little wife of that poor gentleman as was killed, and she only come the once, I don't believe anybody's took that much interest in doing a bit of spade-work. Seems a shame, like, don't it?"
Mrs. Bradley emphatically dissented from this view, but she did not say so. As soon as she left the haunted house this time she went back to Miss Biddle.
"I'm becoming a nuisance," she remarked, "but there is one thing I want to know, and I don't know of anybody else who can help me. These screamings and knockings that seem to have been heard before the death of Mr. Tom Turney ...?"
"I'never heard them myself," Miss Biddle confessed, "but I know who did, and that's my daily woman. But weren't they heard after the death?"
"What kind of witness would she make? I mean, is she the kind to exaggerate what she heard?"
"Oh, yes, certainly. On the other hand, she certainly did hear something. I put down in my commonplace book what she said at the time, and I attach importance to it because it was the first that anybody heard, it seems, of that part of the hauntings, so that it could not have been the result of hearsay, or owing anything to village gossip."
Mrs. Bradley mentally blessed the commonplace book, of which she had heard on her previous visit, and begged that it might be produced. The entry was not dated—a point not of very great importance, since Cousin Tom's death was referred to, and this fixed the time sufficiently for those circumstances which she suspected that she was investigating.
The entry read: Mrs. Gubb very excited and upset. She says she heard screams and yells from the haunted house as she came past this morning on her way here. The other day the new tenant, a Mr. Turney, fell out of a bedroom window and was killed. Mrs. Gubb says that what with one thing and another, nobody will want to go near that house, even in daylight, soon.
Mrs. Bradley asked permission to make a copy of the entry, and, having made it, autographed a copy of one of her own books at Miss Biddle's deprecating but eager request, departed, went back to the inn, carefully collated such information as she now possessed, heard half a dozen more legends of ancient hauntings from the villagers, and went off again to interview Mrs. Muriel.
"I want you to come back to that house with me, Mrs. Turney," she said. A request couched in such terms was almost bound to be refused, and Mrs. Bradley was not at all surprised to hear Cousin Muriel reply :
"Oh, no, really, really, I couldn't. You don't know what you're asking! I'll tell you anything you like about the house, but I couldn't possibly set foot in it again, and nobody ought to expect it."