“I’d like to put it by,” he declared, “but how can a man do so? Can you deny there is sorrow come to this house, undeserved and unforeseen? Yes, the curse of ill luck will lie on a house until some one knows how to drive it away. And the best time for lifting such a spell is in the hour before midnight and in the dark of the moon.” Betsey stood up and took her basket. “I am not going to believe what you say,” she insisted stoutly, “and I am going in to see Miss Miranda. You have not told me yet how her father is.” “I had orders not to tell you until I must,” he said gently. “He is worse, much worse. The doctor has been here all day and Miss Miranda looks like a ghost.” “Oh,” cried Betsey in distress, then added with almost a sob of relief, “Oh, here’s David!” For David, striding out of the shadows, seemed a very comforting presence. “I nailed them,” he announced elegantly the moment he came near. “The examiners were a clever set of fellows, they managed to guess at all the things I knew and to ask me about very little else. I make them my compliments. And now, how are things going?” He heard the bad news in troubled silence, took up Elizabeth’s basket without a word and turned to the house. Poor old Michael stood staring after them, hopeless and distressed, unable to speak. Miss Miranda stood by the door, talking to the doctor who was just going. “He is quieter,” the doctor was saying, “and the night may pass easily. But if he should be delirious again—” “I will be here, sir,” David announced briefly, at his side. “You will? Good, you can be of some help if things go badly. And be sure to call me the moment there is any change. If there were only something that would rouse him from that stupor!” Miss Miranda looked much like a shadow, but she greeted them as cheerily as ever and seemed most eager to know how their affairs had gone during the last three days, and was as happy as they were in the hopeful report of results. “I was rather worried about David,” she admitted, and he confessed cheerfully that he had been much worse than worried about himself. “At the last minute I began quite to enjoy the excitement of it,” he declared, “but I don’t care to go through it a second time. I will never cut things quite so close again.” The cottage was to be crowded that night for Elizabeth was to sleep there, upon Miss Miranda’s urging it, and David, since there were no more spare beds, undertook to make up a couch for himself on one of the low benches in the workshop. Elizabeth had opportunity, while Miss Miranda had gone to fetch some blankets, of telling David that Michael, too, had been seeing strange things in the garden of the ruined house. “I can guess what Michael thought if he saw that moving light,” the boy observed. “He would have a hundred explanations where we have not been able to find one. When we get some of these other affairs off our minds, we will have to go and watch for it again.”