Upon the words, a strange voice, a man's voice, cried out in the hall below, with mingled anger and surprise, "Damnation!" it shouted, "What d'ye mean by _this_?" Mrs. Pallinder screamed harshly like a strangling animal, and with a truly melodramatic fitness, the door bell began furiously to ring! That was too much for us. I don't know who was first in the hall; it seemed as if we were all there at once. The immediate person I saw was Mazie standing against the opposite wall. She had snatched up some kind of shawl or blanket and wrapped it around her over her nightgown; her face was white, but she was laughing in a hysterical way. At the head of the stair Mrs. Pallinder clung to the newel. From the hall there arose a clamour of excited voices, punctuated by peal after peal on the bell like the knocking at the castle-gate in the awful scene of the murder from "Macbeth." The door of Mrs. Botlisch's room was open, and there was the old woman sitting up in bed, a tremendous figure in her red flannel nightdress, roaring out questions to which no one paid any attention. "Oh, do go back, girls, do go back, here 're the men!" said Mazie, still giggling feebly. "Men!" cried her grandmother, catching the word. "Time enough! I'd like to see someone with some sense. Where's that Taylor feller?" "Taylor--what Taylor?" said I, bewildered. I thought, for an instant, the old woman had suddenly gone crazy, and wanted to be measured for a pair of breeches. Anything seemed possible in the hurly-burly. "Here I am," said J. B., presenting himself in trousers and a night-shirt, one red sock and one polka-dotted blue one, and his suspenders trailing in the rear. "He went the kilt one better, didn't he?" said Kitty, recalling his appearance later, and she wondered what Muriel thought. But if the men were a weird crew, what were we? "Here I am," said J. B. "What's the matter? Can I do anything?" He afterwards said that everything under the sun that could have happened went through his mind, from fire and murder to the reappearance of Arthur Gwynne's ghost--everything that could have happened, except the inconceivable thing that _had_ happened! Mazie ran to the banisters. "Do somebody open the door! Can't you hear the bell?" she screamed. "Find out who it is first! Find out who it is--don't let them in without finding out!" Mrs. Pallinder called out desperately. "You Taylor, for the Lord's sake, see what it's all about!" cried Mrs. Botlisch. "Mirandy, gimme my teeth----" A fresh outbreak of voices downstairs announced that the door had finally been opened. Mazie came running back as Colonel Pallinder limped up the stairs. "There! _Huddesley!_" she exclaimed and burst into shrill laughter. "They're asking for him. The minute that man opened the package I thought about Huddesley. Never mind, ma, they can't come on _us_ for anything. Huddesley's got the laugh on everybody!"