“Then I will walk.”
Aunt Nancy thumped her stick angrily on the floor.
“You will stay right here until I’m ready for you to go, Miss Puss. I never tolerate any whims but my own. Caroline knows that, don’t you, Caroline? Sit down to your breakfast—and eat—eat.”
Aunt Nancy glared at Emily.
“I won’t stay here,” said Emily. “I won’t stay another night in that horrible haunted room. It was cruel of you to put me there. If—” Emily gave Aunt Nancy glare for glare—“if I was Salome I’d ask for your head on a charger.”
“Hoity-toity! What nonsense is this about a haunted room? We’ve no ghosts at Wyther Grange. Have we, Caroline? We don’t consider them hygienic.”
“You have something dreadful in that room—it rustled and moaned and cried all night long right in the wall behind my bed. I won’t stay—I won’t—.”
Emily’s tears came in spite of her efforts to repress them. She was so unstrung nervously that she couldn’t help crying. It lacked but little of hysterics with her already.
Aunt Nancy looked at Caroline and Caroline looked back at Aunt Nancy.
“We should have told her, Caroline. It’s all our fault. I clean forgot—it’s so long since any one slept in the Pink Room. No wonder she was frightened. Emily, you poor child, it was a shame. It would serve me right to have my head on a charger, you vindictive scrap. We should have told you.”
“Told me—what?”
“About the swallows in the chimney. That was what you heard. The big central chimney goes right up through the walls behind your bed. It is never used now since the fireplaces were built in. The swallows nest there—hundreds of them. They do make an uncanny noise—fluttering and quarrelling as they do.”
