“But,” I expostulated, “when one thinks of the convenience, and—­”

“I am sorry.”  Her voice had a note of finality.  “I daresay I am old-fashioned, but—­I do not like changes.  I shall have to ask you not to interfere with the telephone.”

I could hardly credit my senses.  Her tone was one of reproof, plus decision.  It convicted me of an indiscretion.  If I had asked to take the roof off and replace it with silk umbrellas, it might have been justified.  But to a request to move the telephone!

“Of course, if you feel that way about it,” I said, “I shall not touch it.”

I dropped the subject, a trifle ruffled, I confess, and went upstairs to fetch a box in which Miss Emily was to carry away some flowers from the garden.

It was when I was coming down the staircase that I saw Maggie.  She had carried the hall candlesticks, newly polished, to their places on the table, and was standing, a hand on each one, staring into the old Washington mirror in front of her.  From where she was she must have had a full view of Miss Emily in the library.  And Maggie was bristling.  It was the only word for it.

She was still there when Miss Emily had gone, blowing on the mirror and polishing it.  And I took her to task for her unfriendly attitude to the little old lady.

“You practically threw her muffins at her,” I said.  “And I must speak again about the cups—­”

“What does she come snooping around for, anyhow?” she broke in.  “Aren’t we paying for her house?  Didn’t she get down on her bended knees and beg us to take it?”

“Is that any reason why we should be uncivil?”

“What I want to know is this,” Maggie said truculently.  “What right has she to come back, and spy on us?  For that’s what she’s doing, Miss Agnes.  Do you know what she was at when I looked in at her?  She was running a finger along the baseboard to see if it was clean!  And what’s more, I caught her at it once before, in the back hall, when she was pretending to telephone for the station hack.”

It was that day, I think, that I put fresh candles in all the holders downstairs.  I had made a resolution like this,—­to renew the candles, and to lock myself in my room and throw the key over the transom to Maggie.  If, in the mornings that followed, the candles had been used, it would prove that Martin Sprague was wrong, that even foot-prints could lie, and that some one was investigating the lower floor at night.  For while my reason told me that I had been the intruder, my intuition continued to insist that my sleepwalking was a result, not a cause.  In a word, I had gone downstairs, because I knew that there had been and might be again, a night visitor.

Yet, there was something of comedy in that night’s precautions, after all.

At ten-thirty I was undressed, and Maggie had, with rebellion in every line of her, locked me in.  I could hear her, afterwards running along the hall to her own room and slamming the door.  Then, a moment later, the telephone rang.