"She gave no reason of her own accord, Mr. Frank, but I got it out of her. 'What has Trennach done to you, and what has the old house on the Plain done to you, that you should be frightened at it?' I said to her. For it's easy to gather that she is frightened in her mind, Mr. Frank, and Pellet's wife had noticed the same ever since she went there. 'Don't say such things, mother,' says she, 'it is nothing.' 'But I will say it,' says I, 'and I know the cause--just the shock you had that Tuesday night from the Seven Whistlers, and a fear that you might hear them again if you came back; and a fine simpleton you must be for your pains!' And so she is." "Ah, yes, the Seven Whistlers," repeated Frank, absently. "She could not contradict me. She only burst into tears and begged of me not to talk of them. Not talk, indeed! I could have shook her, I could!" "We cannot help our fears," said Frank. "But for a girl to let they sounds scare her out of house and home and country, is downright folly," pursued Dame Bell, unable to relinquish the theme, and splitting the button of the shirt-collar in two at one stroke of the angry iron. "And she must fright and fret herself into a skeleton besides! But there," she resumed, in easier tones, after folding the shirt, "I suppose she can't help it. Her father was just as much afraid of 'em. He never had an atom o' colour in his face from the Sunday night he heard the Whistlers till the Tuesday night when he disappeared. It had a curious grey look on it all the while." Frank rose. He remembered the grey look well enough. "If Rosaline likes Falmouth best, she is better there, Mrs. Bell. I should not press her to return." "If pressing would do any good, she'd have her share of it," rejoined Mrs. Bell, candidly. "But it won't. I did press, for the matter of that. When I'd done pressing on my score, I put it on the score of her father. 'Don't you care to be at home to welcome your poor lost father when he gets back to it--for he's sure to come back, sooner or later,' says I: and I'm sure my eyes ran tears as I spoke. But no: she just turned as white as the grave, Mr. Frank, and shook her head in a certain solemn way of hers, which she must have picked up at Falmouth: and I saw it was of no use, though I talked till doomsday. There she stops, and there she will stop, and I must make the best of it. And I wish those evil Whistlers had been at the bottom of the sea!" Frank was in a hurry to depart: but she went on again, after taking breath. "She is earning money, and her aunt is glad to have her, and takes care of her, and she says she never saw any girl so expert with her fingers and display so much taste in bonnets as Rosaline. But that does not mend the matter here, Mr. Frank, and is no excuse for her being such a goose. 'Come and take a room in Falmouth, mother,' were her last words when I was leaving. But I'd like to know what a poor lone body like me could do in that strange place."