"They're only beginning now!" said Miss Bennett, interpreting without resentment my glance at it. "Last night it was near one o'clock in the morning when they had high tea, and then they took to singing songs, and playing 'Are you there, Mike?' and cock-fighting." I rose hastily, and began to search for my overcoat and cap, prepared to plunge into the frosty night, when Miss Bennett offered to show me a short way through the house to the stableyard, where I had left the car. "I slipped out that way after dinner," she said, picking up a fur-lined cloak and wrapping it about her. "I wanted to make sure the mare had a second rug on her this cold night." I followed Miss Bennett through a wheezy swing-door; a flagged passage stretched like a tunnel before us, lighted by a solitary candle planted in its own grease in a window. A long battle-line of bicycles occupied one side of the passage; there were doors, padlocked and cobwebbed, on the other. A ragged baize door at the end of the tunnel opened into darkness that smelt of rat-holes, and was patched by a square or two of moonlight. "This is a sort of a lobby," said Miss Bennett. "Mind! There's a mangle there--and there are oars on the floor somewhere----" As she spoke I was aware of a distant humming noise, like bees in a chimney. "That sounds uncommonly like a motor," I said. "That's only the boiler," replied Miss Bennett; "we're at the back of the kitchen here." She advanced with confidence, and flung open a door. A most startling vista was revealed, of a lighted room with several beds in it. Children's faces, swelled and scarlet, loomed at us from the pillows, and an old woman, with bare feet and a shawl over her head, stood transfixed, with a kettle in one hand and a tumbler in the other. Miss Bennett swiftly closed the door upon the vision. "My gracious heavens!" she whispered, "what on earth children are those? I'm sure it's mumps they have, whoever they are. And how secret the McRorys kept it!--and did you see it was punch the old woman was giving them?" "We might have asked her the way to the yard," I said, inwardly resolving to tell Philippa it was scarlatina; "and she might have given us a light." "It was this door I should have tried," said my guide, opening another with considerable circumspection.