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.
I shut the door with a snap, and begged her to be so good as to explain herself.
"It's of no use," she said, doggedly. "You know you won't believe me. But that makes no difference. They come all the same."
"_They_?" asked Allis, smiling. "Do you mean some of your spirits?"
The cold little woman flushed. "These are not _my_ spirits. I know nothing about them. I did not mean to obtrude a subject so disagreeable to you while I was in your family; but I have seldom been in a house in which the Influences were so strong. I don't know what they mean, nor anything about them, but just that they're here. They wake me up, twitching my elbows, nearly every night."
"Twitching my elbows," she repeated, gravely.
I broke into a laugh, from which neither my politeness nor the woman's heightened color could save me, bought the cat and ordered the rat-trap without delay.
That night, when Miss Fellows had "retired,"--she never "went to bed" in simple English like other people,--I stole softly out in my stockings and screwed a little brass button outside of her door. I had made a gimlet-hole for it in the morning when our guest was out shopping; it fitted into place without noise. Without noise I turned it, and went back to my own room.
"One is always justified in suspecting a Spiritualistic medium."