No doubt the situation of the Warder's Room, cut off as it was so completely from the rest of the house, had first obtained it its ghostly renown; one not likely to dwindle, by the knowledge that its outer door giving on the staircase was always kept locked. This, however, was no more than an ordinary precaution; since the room stood literally in the very portal of the whole house, though time had brought its changes, and various small doors in the new wing now admitted by the wicket the maltster's few visitors and his workpeople to the malt-yard. [Sidenote: A grim greeting.] The master of the house himself did not set foot inside the Warder's Room twice in a year; and when on that May morning, before starting for Nether Hall, Ruth entered it, according to her daily custom, to let a little fresh air and sunshine into its grim silence, she had been startled at perceiving her father standing with folded arms and sombre brows near the hearth, gazing into its cold blackness as if lost in moody thought. On becoming conscious of her presence, however, he had roused up from his abstraction, and with a hurried and absent "Good morrow, child," he turned and went out, locking the door behind him. CHAPTER V. HOW MASTER RUMBOLD TOLD LAWRENCE LEE WHAT THE VERY AIR MIGHT NOT HEAR. This recollection of the morning, troubles Ruth strangely now, as she sits in the broad window-seat of her own room, her eyes fixed indeed on the fair moon-lit scene before her, but for once seeing nothing of its beauty. Vague fears and suspicions and dread of coming evil weigh down her heart, as one by one she threads together the incidents of this May-day, which was to have been such a golden one. It is all in vain that she laughingly tells herself her father has every right to perambulate his own premises. All in vain she argues that Lawrence Lee may be as sulky as a bear with a sore head, if it gives him any pleasure; and no concern of hers. Certainly not. All the same too, of course, it is to her if a legion of coal-barges come their way, so long as it is not she who stands in Master Sheppard's shoes. For her part, however, Ruth could not consider the landlady of the "King's Arms" at all a bad sort. On the contrary, she entertained a great liking for her. Folks were fond of saying that Mistress Sheppard had a shrewish tongue; but Ruth had never felt its edge. The good woman was as foolish as everybody else in the matter of spoiling the little mistress of the Rye House; and though she would as soon tell a prince of the blood a piece of her mind, as she would the stable-boy of her own establishment, if she saw fit, she would have vowed the old dun-cow to be white as milk, if it could have afforded Ruth any satisfaction; or declared that Master Richard Rumbold was the most urbane and delightful gentleman in all the country, though no love, to put it mildly, was lost between her and her opposite neighbour. [Sidenote: The hostess of the "King's Arms."]