In order to obey my sister's injunction to keep the woman's attention I began to talk to her, asking her how long she had lived in Sea-Strand Cottage. I had just gathered from her grudging, mumbling speech that she had lived there since the cottage was built, when my sister was in the room again. Julia watched the caretaker shovel the things on to the tray, and, sighing bitterly the while, drag wearily out of the room with them. She turned to me, then, with a nod eloquent. "Locked," she enunciated. "The door was locked. Why--why should the woman want to lock her bedroom door when she is out of it?" "She returns the compliment you have paid her, and thinks you not to be trusted," I suggested. "If I have to climb on the roof and pull off the tiles, I'll see what is in that room before I go to bed tonight!" Julia declared. Then Mrs Ragg came back for the tablecloth. "I slept very badly last night, Mrs Ragg," said Julia. Mrs Ragg sucked in her cheeks, sighed heavily, made no answer. "And so did you, I'm afraid. You were very restless. You walked about half the night." "Me, miss?" She had folded the cloth, but she dropped it from her shaking, awkward hands, stooped to recover it, dropped it again. "Begging your pardon, no, miss." "Who, then?" Julia asked inflexibly. The woman turned away with the cloth and shuffled hastily to the door. "Wait," commanded Julia. "Who, then? There was no one else in your bedroom besides you, I suppose?" Mrs Ragg hurriedly rejected the insinuation. She had had a pain in her chest, she remembered now, and had got up for remedies. "Of course you heard me rapping on the wall and asking you to keep still? You heard that, at least, Mrs Ragg?" "Yes," Mrs Ragg had heard that, certainly. She admitted the fact as if it had been a sin, with a look of actual horror upon her face. "You heard?" asked Julia of me in a kind of triumph as we were alone. "There was not a sound through all the night. I never rapped upon the wall. Now, why is she lying? It may be nothing to you, but I mean to know." Once more that morning, coming from our own rooms, dressed for walking, Julia tried the caretaker's door. Finding it fast, shook it, and turned from doing so to find Mrs Ragg, arrived on the scene in her felt shoes, standing behind her. "Asking your pardon, miss, that is my room," the woman said; with a feeble kind of offence she went and put herself before the door. "We have hired the cottage; I presume we have the right to look even into your room, if we deem it advisable," Julia said, with her haughtiest air. "So, you always keep your room locked, Mrs Ragg?" "When strangers are about I do," Mrs Ragg replied; and although she was apparently afraid of us she gazed upon us with no goodwill. As we left the house, Julia called my attention to the fact that the blind in the room next to her own was drawn. "All the same, I don't sleep again beneath your Mrs Ragg's roof till I've been into her bedroom," she declared.