"Stop a moment, I'll show you," cried Constancy, opening a door, and running along the narrow polished oak passage beyond it. The younger girl stood still at the head of the dark old staircase, and looked timidly around her. The wind whistled softly round the house, and stirred the neglected creepers outside, so that they creaked on their rusty nails, and tapped with their long arms against the windows. She felt the bygoneness and unusedness of the place, and a feeling of awe stole over her. Suddenly a sound of eerie sobbing and sighing, followed first by a wild, mournful cry and then by a ringing laugh sounded through the house. The next moment Cosy came running down the passage, laughing still. "There! See how easy it is," she said. "That's how ghost-stories are hatched. I can make up a beauty for Waynflete, and study the results. Bless me! is it ringing the door-bell? No, that must be the Waynflete boys arriving. Come along, Flo, we'll be ready to receive them." Mrs John Palmer, kind, pretty, and easy-mannered, was a charming hostess, and the two lads had not been many minutes in the long, low drawing-room of the ancestral home that was so strange to them before she had set them quite at their ease. She pointed out to them the quaint old furniture, some of which must have been in Waynflete Hall before it was sold, and praised the old panelling and the low ceiling, with big black beams running across it. Then she encouraged them to talk about themselves, found out that they were both at a great public school, but that Guy was just going to Oxford. He was musical, and meant to read for honours, while Godfrey, besides being well up in the school, had done everything in the way of athletics which was possible at sixteen. Then she proposed that the girls should show them round the place; and the four young people went out together, across a lawn cut up by odd-shaped flower-beds, full of old-fashioned flowers, "inconvenient, but unique," as Constancy said, moving towards the paddock, where they discovered the possibility of making a tennis-ground. The two boys were soon congenially employed in stepping it out, and they all grew intimate over their respective experiences of the game, and of other occupations and amusements. Florella was a kind and cheerful girl, wishful of giving pleasure; and Constancy, though she watched the two Waynfletes keenly, and "studied" them as she talked with spirit, was not at all occupied with her own relations to them; and, as Godfrey remarked afterwards, "was more like a fellow than a girl, except that she talked about the work her form was doing, which a fellow never wanted to do."