“What awful fun you could have playing horrible games like hide and seek up here,” he said. “I hope you do. Lord, what’s that groan? Oh, a cistern, is it? I thought it must be a ghost. How ripping!” David instantly dismissed his resolution of not playing games here any more. “Oh, there’s a worse room yet,” he said. “Do come and look at it. There’s a box like a coffin in it. Margery and I used to play gorgeous games up here, dressing up and frightening each other, you know. Wasn’t it fun, Margery?” Margery was the soul of loyalty. She would no more have reminded David that only to-day he had come to the conclusion that these games were silly than she would have had him led out to instant execution. “Yes, when it begins to get dark it’s awful up here,” she said. “You can’t see anything distinctly, and the cistern suddenly groans, and you can’t tell what’s coming next!” Maddox, in spite of his seventeen years and Olympian elevation, did not seem to be unbending. David, in fact, if his utterances this afternoon were to be taken literally, had to unbend to him. “I love being frightened,” said Maddox. “You ought to read ghost stories to each other here, and the one who reads may make any sort of noise he chooses at any moment. Just when the ghost is going to appear, you know. Lord, I hope I shall never get beyond that sort of thing!” He, Margery, and David were standing in a row opposite the coffin-shaped box. Just then the cistern in the room behind gave one of its best goblin-groans, and Maddox looked awfully round. “Oh, what’s that?” he said. “That’s not the cistern. That’s a man bleeding to death in there, that is. His throat’s cut from ear to ear.” “No,” said David. “I’m sure it was the cistern.” “Are you? It may have been the cistern before, but I don’t believe it was that time. Pity it’s not a little darker. There’s too much light really just now.” Already to David the attic bristled again with entrancing possibilities, under this stimulus. It was queer that any one of Maddox’s age and attainments should see sport in what a few hours ago had seemed childish and savourless to himself, but since this was so, it was clear there must be something in it. But school-boy hero-worship made him see through his hero’s eyes, and all that Maddox did or said was invested with authority. True, he had seen him perhaps half a dozen times altogether, but that was quite sufficient to make this matchless glamour. In all the world there was no one so instinct with romance and glory as this boy three years his senior who realised for him all he wanted to be. Of course they went downstairs again on the pronouncement that it was not dark enough. “I’m afraid you’ll think the garden is rot,” said David. “There’s a beastly mulberry-tree bang in the middle of the lawn. But it’s not so bad to have tea in: Margery, can’t we have tea out there?”