"To think, Cecilia, that I should never have known of this if that chimney had not smoked!"--a remark that caused Pepperton to glance at me curiously. He knew as well as I did that with ordinary care every flue in that house would have drawn splendidly. "Beyond any question," Miss Octavia kept asserting, "beneath the chambers of the old house down there we shall find the bones of that British soldier who perished here; or it is even possible that a chest of hidden treasure is concealed beneath the floor. What do you yourself suspect, Mr. Pepperton?" We were lighting candles preparatory to stepping down into the dark stairway, and Pepperton was plainly hard put to keep from laughing. "I assure you, Miss Hollister, that I have told you all I know about the rooms down there. I 'm not very strong in the ghost-faith; and our friend the umbrella-man never dreamed of such a thing, I assure you, not even after he had satisfied his fierce craving for pie." Miss Octavia followed Pepperton slowly, pausing frequently to hold her candle close to the stair-walls, whose rough surfaces confirmed all that Pepperton had said of the preservation of the old timbers. I had brought a handful of candles, and when we had reached the dark rooms beneath, I lighted these and set them up in the black corners of the old rooms, in which, Miss Octavia remarked, not even the wall paper had been disturbed. The exit into the coal-cellar, and concealed openings left for ventilation which had escaped me before, were now pointed out by the architect, who kept laughing at the huge joke of it all. Cecilia murmured her surprise repeatedly as we continued the examination; nothing quite like this had ever happened in the world before, but even as we walked through those hidden rooms my thoughts reverted to the crisis so near at hand in her affairs. I had pledged myself to her service, but I saw no way yet of assuring the proper sequence of proposals. The ultimate seventh must be Wiggins; but how could I manage the penultimate sixth! Cecilia's own apparent freedom from care on this tour of inspection deepened my sense of responsibility to all concerned. Dick might by now have persuaded some one of the others at the inn to offer himself, thus closing the gap, and I had determined that the Westerner should not outwit me. It was some consolation to know that while Cecilia was in these lost rooms in my company, she was safe from Dick's machinations. My thoughts were, however, given a new direction by Miss Octavia. She had been scrutinizing the floor closely, asking us all to bring our candles to bear upon it, that she might search thoroughly for any signs of a trapdoor beneath which the bones of the British soldier might repose. "You can't tell me," she averred in her own peculiar vein, "that a house as old as this has been preserved merely to divert calamity from a superstitious gentleman engaged in the manufacture of ribless umbrellas and a dyspepsia cure."