“On the door?”

“On the door, on the mantel, on the foot of the bed, on the head-board,—­Fred, right on the head-board!  I listened till I grew cold listening, but it rapped and it rapped, and by and by it was morning, and it stopped.”

“Rats!” said I.

“Then rats have knuckles,” said she.

“Mice!” said I, “wind! broken plaster! crickets! imagination! dreams! fancies! blind headache! nonsense!  Next time wake me up, and fire pillows at me till I’m pleasant to you.  Now I’ll have a kiss and a cup of coffee.  Any sugar in it?”

Tip fell down the cellar stairs that day, and the baby swallowed a needle and two gutta-percha buttons, which I had been waiting a week to have sewed on my vest, so that Alison had enough else to think about, and the little incident of the raps was forgotten.  I believe it was not recalled by either of us till after Gertrude Fellows came.

It was on a Monday and in a drizzly storm that I brought her from the station.  She was a thin, cold, phantom-like woman, shrouded in water-proofs and green barege veils.  Why is it that homely women always wear green barege veils?  She did not improve in appearance when her wraps were off, and she was seated by my parlor grate.  Her large green eyes had no speculation in them.  Her mouth—­an honest mouth, that was one mercy—­quivered and shrank when she was addressed suddenly, as if she felt herself to be a sort of foot-ball that the world was kicking about at pleasure,—­your gentlest smile might prove a blow.  She seldom spoke unless she were spoken to, and fell into long reveries, with her eyes on the window or the coals.  She wore a horrible sort of ruff,—­“illusion,” I think Allis called it,—­which, of all contrivances that she could have chosen to encircle her sallow neck, was exactly the most unbecoming.  She was always knitting blue stockings,—­I never discovered for what or whom; and she wore her lifeless hair in the shape of a small toy cartwheel, on the back of her head.

However, she brightened a little in the course of the first week, helped Alison about the baby, kept herself out of my way, read her Bible and the “Banner of Light” in about equal proportion, and became a mild, inoffensive, and, on the whole, not unpleasant addition to the family.

She had been in the house about ten days, I think, when Alison, with a disturbed face, confided to me that she had spent another wakeful night with those “rats” behind the head-board; I had been down with a sick-headache the day before, and she had not wakened me.  I promised to set a trap and buy a cat before evening, and was closing the door upon the subject, being already rather late at the office, when the expression of Gertrude Fellows’s face detained me.

“If I were you, I—­wouldn’t—­really buy a very expensive trap, Mr. Hotchkiss.  It will be a waste of money, I am afraid.  I heard the noise that disturbed Cousin Alison”; and she sighed.