"Yes. I'm loving it. What happens next? Do the stairs wind round and round till we get to the top?" "Yes. There are about six hundred of 'em. Feel equal to it?" "Equal to anything," said Toby promptly. "Let me go first!" "Why don't I go and get a light?" said Bunny. "Because you're not to. Because it's heaps more fun without. Besides, there's lots of light up there. Now then? Are you ready? Come on! Let's go!" Indomitable resolution sounded in Toby's voice. She drew herself free from Bunny's hold, and began to mount. "You know it's haunted, don't you?" said Bunny cheerily. "A beautiful lady was once captured and imprisoned in this turret in the dear old days when everyone did those things. She had to choose between throwing herself from the battlements and marrying her wicked captor--an ancestor of Charlie's, by the way. She did the latter and then died of a broken heart. They always did, you know. Her poor little ghost has wandered up and down this stair ever since." "Idiot!" said Toby tersely. "Who?" said Bunny. "And why?" "The woman. Why didn't she throw herself over? It would have been much easier." "Perhaps she didn't find it so," said Bunny. "And she'd doubtless have done the haunting stunt even if she had." "Well, then, why didn't she marry the brute and--and--give him hell?" said Toby tensely. Bunny uttered a shout of laughter that echoed and re-echoed up and down the winding stair. "Is that what you would have done?" "I'd have done one or the other," said Toby. "By Jove, how bloodthirsty you sound!" ejaculated Bunny. "Are you in earnest by any chance?" "Yes, I am in earnest." There was a note of bitter challenge in Toby's reply. "If a woman hasn't the spunk to defend herself, she's better dead." "I agree with you there," said Bunny with decision. "But I don't know how you come to know it." "Oh, I know a lot of things," said Toby's voice in the darkness, and this time it sounded oddly cold and desolate as if the stone walls around them had somehow deadened it. He put out a hand and touched her, for she seemed in some fashion to have withdrawn from him, to have become remote as the echoes about them. "There are heaps of things you don't know anyway," he said. "You're only a kid after all." "Think so?" said Toby. She evaded his hand, flitting up before him towards that grim slit in the wall through which the dim half-light of the summer night vaguely entered. Her light figure became visible to him as she reached it. There came to him a swift memory of the butterfly-beauty that had so astounded him earlier in the evening. "No, I don't," he said. "You're past that stage. What on earth has Maud been doing to you? Do you know when you first came into the drawing-room tonight I hardly knew you?"