To Elizabeth, then, the boys betook themselves, and, being special favourites, she took them into her own little snuggery, and they had tea again. Oh no, don't feel alarmed, gentle reader: two teas, ten teas if you like, matter nothing to Fernhall boys--their hides are elastic, and even the pancakes of Shrove Tuesday merely cause a slight depression of spirits for the next twenty-four hours. 'Now, 'Lizabeth, you dear old brick, we want you to tell us something. What's up to-night at "the house"?' 'Nothing that I know of, Master Winthrop, except that some of them officers is a coming up from their barracks to dinner with Miss Beauty and the other young ladies as is staying here.' 'Oh! o--o--oh, as the man said when the brickbat hit him where he'd meant to put his dinner; and what, Lizzie darling, may they be going to do after dinner?' 'Piano-punching, I suppose, dear, and a little chess with the governor; and then what----?' 'Bed? It will be slow for them, won't it?' 'No, Master Hales, piano-punching indeed, when Miss Beauty plays sweet enough to wake the blessed dead.' 'Did wake them, "Grannie," the other night, didn't she, and they seem to have taken an active share in the musical part of the entertainment?' 'There's no talking with such a random boy as you, but there, if you want to know, that's just what they have all come about. They say that when Miss Beauty was going to bed the other night she heard that soft, wailing music, like what we hear here every year just about this time, and she was so sure that there was something really unnatural about it that the Professor has given her leave to sit up with the other guests, and Captain Lowndes, and the rest in the monitors' common room, to see if they can catch the ghost, and for goodness sake don't you say as I told you, but if you knows the ghost tell him not to walk to-night, as the Professor says such nonsense must be stamped out for good. There now!' Poor old Elizabeth looked as if she had committed a crime, and puffed and blew and pulled at her two little chin tufts (for, alas, she was bearded like the pard) in a way that nearly sent the boys into convulsions at her own tea-table. But they contained themselves (and about three plates full of muffins), and by-and-by departed. There was a long and earnest conversation in a certain study that night. There was a surplice missing from amongst the properties of the choir, and then the four hundred wended sleepily from chapel to their dormitories. In half an hour the lights were out in all windows save those of the head-master's house; stillness fell upon Fernhall; a big bright moon came out upon the scene and made those long grass meadows gleam like the silver sea just beyond them; a bat or two whirled about above the master's orchard, and but for them, and the merry party up at the house, Fernhall, once the smuggler's home, now the busy public school, slept to the lullaby of the summer waves. * * * * * *