"I do now, although I had no suspicion of it at the time. Athalie received her proposal on the Saturday, the baron gave his consent on the Sunday, and on Monday night the villa was mysteriously burnt, leaving all three of us without an immediate refuge. In the meantime, Madame la Comtesse had purchased the ruin of the Château Larouge, and during the period of her brother's deferred proposal was engaged in fitting it up as an abode for herself and him. On the very day it was finished, Monsieur Merode asked for Athalie's hand." "Oho!" said Cleek, with a strong rising inflection. "I think I begin to smell the toasting of the cheese. Of course, when the villa was burnt out, Madame la Comtesse insisted that, as the _fiancée_ of her brother, Mlle. de Carjorac must make her home at the Château until the necessary repairs could be completed; and, of course, the baron had to go with her?" "Yes," admitted Ailsa. "The baron accepted--Athalie would not have allowed him to decline had he wished to--so we all three went there and have been residing there ever since. On the night after our arrival an alarming, a horrifying thing occurred. It was while we were at dinner that the conversation turned upon the supernatural--upon houses and places that were reputed to be haunted--and then Madame la Comtesse made a remarkable statement. She laughingly asserted that she had just learned that, in purchasing the Château Larouge, she had also become the possessor of a sort of family ghost. She said that she had only just heard--from an outside source--that there was a horrible legend connected with the place; in short, that for centuries it had been reputed to be under a sort of spell of evil and to be cursed by a dreadful visitant known as 'The Red Crawl'--a hideous and loathsome creature, neither spider nor octopus, but horribly resembling both--which was supposed to 'appear' at intervals in the middle of the night, and, like the fabled giants of fairy tales, carry off 'lovely maidens and devour them.'" "Who is responsible for that ridiculous assertion, I wonder? I think I may say that I know as much about the Château Larouge and its history as anybody, Miss Lorne, but I never heard of this supposed 'legend' before in all my life." "So the baron, too, declared, laughing as derisively as any of us over the story, although it is well known that he has a natural antipathy to all crawling things--an abhorrence inherited from his mother--and has been known to run like a frightened child from the appearance of a mere garden spider."