All three communicated with each
other, and each room had a second door
opening on a long passage, the entrance to
which was on the right hand side of the first-floor
landing. Before leading the way into
these rooms, the housekeeper touched Sarah
on the shoulder to intimate that it was time
to be moving on.

"As for the ghost-story," resumed Mrs,
Pentreath while she opened the breakfast-room
door, "you must apply to the ignorant
people who believe in it, if you want to hear
it all told. Whether the ghost is an old
ghost or a new ghost, and why she is supposed
to walk, is more than I can tell you."
In spite of the housekeeper's affectation of
indifference towards the popular superstition,
she had heard enough of the ghost-story to
frighten her, though she would not confess it.
Inside the house, or outside the house, nobody
much less willing to venture into the north
rooms alone could in real truth have been
found than Mrs. Pentreath herself.

While the housekeeper was drawing up
the blinds in the breakfast-parlour, and while
Mr. Munder was opening the door that led
out of it into the library, Uncle Joseph stole
to his niece's side, and spoke a few words of
encouragement to her in his quaint, kindly
way.

"Courage!" he whispered. "Keep your
wits about you, Sarah, and catch your little
opportunity whenever you can."

"My thoughts! My thoughts!" she
answered in the same low key. "This house
rouses them all against me. O, why did I
ever venture into it again!"

"You had better look at the view from
the window now," said Mrs. Pentreath, after
she had drawn up the blind. "It is very
much admired."

While affairs were in this stage of progress
on the first floor of the house, Betsey, who
had been hitherto stealing up by a stair at a
time from the hall, and listening with all
her ears in the intervals of the ascent,
finding that no sound of voices now reached
her, bethought herself of returning to the
kitchen again, and of looking after the housekeeper's
dinner, which was being kept warm
by the fire. She descended to the lower
regions, wondering what part of the house
the strangers would want to see next, and
puzzling her brains to find out some excuse
for attaching herself to the exploring party.

After the view from the breakfast-room
window had been duly contemplated, the
library was next entered. In this room,
Mrs. Pentreath, having some leisure to look
about her, and employing that leisure in
observing the conduct of the steward, arrived
at the unpleasant conviction that Mr. Munder
was by no means to be depended on to assist
her in the important business of watching
the proceedings of the two strangers. Doubly
stimulated to assert his own dignity by the
disrespectfully easy manner in which he had
been treated by Uncle Joseph, the sole object
of Mr. Munder's ambition seemed to be to
divest himself as completely as possible of
the character of guide, which the unscrupulous
foreigner sought to confer on him. He
sauntered heavily about the rooms, with the
air of a casual visitor, staring out of window,
peeping into books on tables, frowning at himself
in the chimney-glasses— looking, in short,
anywhere but where he ought to look. The
housekeeper, exasperated by this affectation
of indifference, whispered to him irritably to
keep his eye on the foreigner, as it was quite
as much as she could do to look after the
lady in the quiet dress.

"Very good; very good," said Mr. Munder,
with sulky carelessness. "And where
are you going to next, ma'am, after we have
been into the drawing-room? Back again,
through the library, into the breakfast-room?
or out at once into the passage? Be good
enough to settle which, as you seem to be in
the way of settling everything."

"Into the passage, to be sure," answered
Mrs. Pentreath, "to show the next three
rooms beyond these."

Mr. Munder sauntered out of the library,
through the doorway of communication, into
the drawing-room, unlocked the door leading
into the passage— then, to the great disgust
of the housekeeper, strolled to the fireplace
and looked at himself in the glass over it,
just as attentively as he had looked at himself
in the library mirror, hardly a minute
before.

"This is the west drawing-room," said
Mrs. Pentreath, calling to the visitors. "The
carving of the stone chimney-piece," she
added, with the mischievous intention of bringing
them into the closest proximity to the
steward, "is considered the finest thing in the
whole apartment."

Driven from the looking-glass by this
manœuvre, Mr. Munder provokingly sauntered
to the window, and looked out. Sarah,
still pale and silent— but with a certain
unwonted resoluteness just gathering, as it
were, in the lines about her lips— stopped
thoughtfully by the chimney-piece, when the
housekeeper pointed it out to her. Uncle
Joseph, looking all round the room in his
discursive manner, spied, in the furthest
corner of it from the door that led into the
passage, a beautiful maplewood table and
cabinet, of a very peculiar pattern. His workman-like
enthusiasm was instantly aroused;
and he darted across the room to examine
the make of the cabinet, closely. The table
beneath, projected a little way in front of it,
and, of all the objects in the world, what
should he see reposing on the flat space of the
projection, but a magnificent musical-box
at least three times the size of his own!

"Aïe! Aïe! Aïe!" cried Uncle Joseph,
in an ascending scale of admiration, which
ended at the very top of his voice. "Open
him! set him going! let me hear what he