The chops were served to us the next morning charred black, uneatable. I pointed them out to Julia on her appearing, and, with a view to deprecating her inevitable wrath, frankly so described them. My sister regarded the lost hopes of our meal with a preoccupied stare; then turned upon me with the wide distending of her eyelids which I knew portended a new worry. "What sort of a night had you?" she asked. "Excellent. And you?" "Frightful. My nerves are all on the stretch, in consequence. I give you warning, Isabella, if you drop your knife or chink your teacup and saucer I shall scream aloud." "You didn't sleep?" "Not a wink." "Were there noises to disturb you?" "Not a sound. That was it! Not a din, Isabella." "That's all right, then." "Is it? You know my room?--just a lath-and-plaster partition between it and hers--that woman's. I ought to have heard every movement, even if she turned in her bed." "It was very thoughtful of Mrs Ragg to lie so still." "She was not there, Isabella." "Not there?" "I'd stake my life on it. It worried me so at last--I _had_ to listen, you know--that I got up and put my ear against the partition. The deadest stillness!" "But even if she was not there, I don't see it is so very alarming." "She says she was. I asked her just now if she was sleeping next to me, and she said yes." "She was, then." "She wasn't." I poured out the tea with impatience. What a constant worry Julia was! Without appearing to cast a backward thought upon the chops, she buttered herself a piece of toast. "Of course, at last, I did fall asleep," she admitted. "And that was the worst of all. Isabella, I dreamt of that horrible little room next to mine, and of the reason it was so still." "Well?" "I dreamt there was a dead woman in it." I laughed at that, and Julia, pausing in the act of taking a bite from her toast, glared angrily at me. "You are a nice, soothing sort of person to be sent away with one supposed to be in want of cheering influences!" I said. "You and your dream of a dead woman!" "I dreamt one was there," Julia said, going on with her toast. "In my opinion one _was_ there," she added, doggedly. When she had finished her breakfast, and had withdrawn her thoughts from the engrossing subject of her dream sufficiently to grumble about the aching void where the chops should have been, she sprang up from the table and loudly tinkled the little bell. "For Mrs Ragg to clear away," she explained to me. "While she is doing so, and you, Isabella, keep her attention engaged on things below, I am going upstairs to have a look at her bedroom." "Absurd!" I ejaculated. "Aren't you absurd?" Julia cried, and turned upon me with scorn. "To take up your abode in a little cut-throat hole like this and not to take the commonest precaution!" She flew upstairs, then, and Mrs Ragg was in the room.