"And her
face as white as a pillow-slip when she tumbled down the stairs."
"No doubt there is some natural explanation for it, Eliza," I
said. "You may have dreamed it, in your `fainting' attack. But
if it is true, the metal rod and the hole in the wall will show
it."
Eliza looked a little bit sheepish.
"The hole's there all right, Miss Innes," she said. "But the bar
was gone when Mary Anne and Rosie went up to pack my trunk."
"That wasn't all," Liddy's voice came funereally from a corner.
"Eliza said that from the hole in the wall a burning eye looked
down at her!"
"The wall must be at least six inches thick," I said with
asperity. "Unless the person who drilled the hole carried his
eyes on the ends of a stick, Eliza couldn't possibly have seen
them."
But the fact remained, and a visit to Eliza's room proved it. I
might jeer all I wished: some one had drilled a hole in the
unfinished wall of the ball-room, passing between the bricks of
the partition, and shooting through the unresisting plaster of
Eliza's room with such force as to send the rod flying on to her
bed. I had gone up-stairs alone, and I confess the thing puzzled
me: in two or three places in the wall small apertures had been
made, none of them of any depth. Not the least mysterious thing
was the disappearance of the iron implement that had been used.
I remembered a story I read once about an impish dwarf that lived
in the spaces between the double walls of an ancient castle.
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