“Well! I wouldn’t do it for a farm,” declared Mrs. McCall, and at once went out of the room, so that the girls could not ask further questions. Agnes whispered to Ruth: “She knows about the ghost, all right!” “Don’t be so silly,” the older girl said. But her own heart throbbed tumultuously as she led the procession up the garret stairs a little later. They could hear the wind whistling around the house up here. A shutter rattled, and then the wind gurgled deep in the throat of one of the unused chimneys. “Goodness!” gasped Tess. “How many strange voices the storm has, hasn’t it? Say, Dot! do you s’pose we’ll find that goat of yours up here now?” “I don’t care,” said the littler girl. “Aggie and Ruth were talking about something that sounded like ‘goat’ that night in bed. And they won’t tell now what it was.” “You must never play eavesdropper,” said Ruth, seriously. “It is very unlady-like.” “Then folks shouldn’t whisper,” declared Dot, quickly. “Nobody would ever _try_ to listen, if folks spoke right out loud. You say, yourself, Ruth, that it’s not polite to whisper.” They opened the garret door and peered in. Although it was so dull a day outside, there was plenty of light up here. The rain beat against some of the windows and the wind shook and rattled the sashes. Ruth’s gaze turned instantly upon the window at which she believed she had seen the moving figure from across Willow Street. There was nothing hanging near that window that could possibly have shown from without. She forced herself to go directly to the place. It was at the right of one of the huge chimneys and she could make no mistake, she thought, for it was at the window to the right of this chimney that she had seen the specter appear not two hours before! A large space about this window was cleared. There was nothing near enough the window that could have represented the garret ghost. But this cleared space before the window seemed to have been made especially for the ghostly capers of the “haunt.” Agnes came gingerly over to where Ruth stood. She whispered in the older girl’s ear: “S’pose that old ghost should appear, Ruth? What would you do? You know, Eva said it was seen only on stormy days.” “Don’t be silly, child,” said Ruth, quite angrily. She was angry as much at herself for “feeling so shaky inside,” as she was at Agnes. She bustled about then, and hurried her sisters, too. They made a good beginning within the next two hours. Of course, it was _only_ a beginning. Dust and cobwebs lay thick over all. They could brush up only the worst of the litter. “Next clear day,” Ruth declared, “we’ll take all these old clothes down and hang what we want to keep on the lines in the yard. Uncle Rufus can have the rest. Why do you suppose Uncle Peter kept this old stuff?” “They say he got so he wouldn’t give away a pin, at the last,” said Agnes. “And some of these old things must have belonged to people dead and gone when Uncle Peter himself was a boy.”