She seemed so alarmed and agitated that Lucy, reminded that any such night disturbance, if occurring on Clementina’s Highland hills, would have meant something of tragic importance, proposed that they should all adjourn to the kitchen together and fortify themselves with cups of coffee. Dawn was already so bright that gas was a ghastly superfluity. Clementina, usually almost obsequious in her methods of attendance, was so shaken that she sat down and allowed the two ladies to make all the little preparations. Yet she suddenly became more communicative than she had ever been before, and also wonderfully interesting. She told of other night alarms of her life—of a wild shriek that went sounding over the moor in one black midnight hour, and was never explained till months afterwards, when a few whitened bones and wasted rags had been found among the heather. She whispered of the heavy knock which fell on her father’s cottage door one bright moonlit evening, though no step was heard on the footpath, and nobody was in sight when they looked forth. “But on the afternoon of that day my brother Niel was killed in India,” she went on in her monotonous mysterious voice, “and when we heard that, we knew what the knock had been. That’s Niel’s memorial,” she added, pointing to the melancholy little framed card. “It tells the date—June 25—and the moon was at the full. It was Rachel’s sweetheart who wrote and told us all about it,” she went on. “It was the year after Rachel had been up seeing her sweetheart’s mother and visiting us. And I mind, wicked sinner as I was, that I grudged that our lad should be taken and hers left. But after all, she was never to see hers again, for as long after as he lived. Eh, but life is short for any of us, whatever!” “Was your house quite lonely?” Tom asked in an awed whisper.