His "Certainly" struck me as a little weaker this time, possibly because his curiosity was excited. "Are you the lady from New York who is staying with them?" he asked, stepping back, seemingly quite unawed by my positive demeanor. "Yes," said I, thawing a trifle; "I am Miss Butterworth." He looked at me almost as if I were a curiosity. "And did you sleep there last night?" he urged. I thought it best to thaw still more. "Of course," I said. "Where do you think I would sleep? The young ladies are friends of mine." He rapped abstractedly on the counter with a small key he was holding. "Excuse me," said he, with some remembrance of my position toward him as a stranger, "but weren't you afraid?" "Afraid?" I echoed. "Afraid in Miss Knollys' house?" "Why, then, do you want a key to your door?" he asked, with a slight appearance of excitement. "We don't lock doors here in the village; at least we didn't." "I did not say it was my door," I began, but, feeling that this was a prevarication not only unworthy of me, but one that he was entirely too sharp to accept, I added stiffly: "It is for my door. I am not accustomed even at home to sleep with my room unlocked." "Oh," he murmured, totally unconvinced, "I thought you might have got a scare. Folks somehow are afraid of that old place, it's so big and ghost-like. I don't think you would find any one in this village who would sleep there all night." "A pleasing preparation for my rest to-night," I grimly laughed. "Dangers on the road and ghosts in the house. Happily I don't believe in the latter." The gesture he made showed incredulity. He had ceased rapping with the key or even to show any wish to join his assistant. All his thoughts for the moment seemed to be concentrated on me. "You don't know little Rob," he inquired, "the crippled lad who lives at the head of the lane?" "No," I said; "I haven't been in town a day yet, but I mean to know Rob and his sister too. Two cripples in one family rouse my interest." He did not say why he had spoken of the child, but began tapping with his key again. "And you are sure you saw nothing?" he whispered. "Lots of things can happen in a lonely road like that." "Not if everybody is as afraid to enter it as you say your villagers are," I retorted. But he didn't yield a jot. "Some folks don't mind present dangers," said he. "Spirits----" But he received no encouragement in his return to this topic. "You don't believe in spirits?" said he. "Well, they are doubtful sort of folks, but when honest and respectable people such as live in this town, when children even, see what answers to nothing but phantoms, then I remember what a wiser man than any of us once said----But perhaps you don't read Shakespeare, madam?"