"Wuss!" she hissed out in a low, sibillant manner.
Dr. Nestley was beginning to feel bewildered with the strangeness of his position. This cold, vault-like hall with its high roof, tesselated black and white diamond pavement, massive figures in suits of armour on either side, seemed to chill his blood, and the three candles held by the three women danced before his eyes like will-o'-the-wisps. A musty odour permeated the atmosphere, and the flickering lights, which only served to show the darkness, assumed to his distorted imagination the semblance of corpse candles. Shaking off this feeling with an effort, he turned to Miss Challoner.
"I think I had better go up at once," he said in a loud, cheerful voice. "Every moment is precious."
Miss Challoner bowed in silence, and preceded him up the stairs, followed by the wriggling Jellicks and the girlish Miss Cassandra, who declined to be left behind.
"No; positively no," she whimpered, shaking her candle and replacing the cosy on her head. "It's like a tomb--the 'Mistletoe Bough,' you know--very odd--he might die--his spirit and all that sort of thing--nerves, doctor, nothing else--chronic; mother's side--dear, dear. I feel like a haunted person in what's-his-name's book? Dickens. Charming, isn't he? So odd."
And, indeed, there was a ghostly flavour about the whole place as they walked slowly up the wide stairs, with the darkness closing densely around them. Every footfall seemed to awake an echo, and the painted faces of the old Garsworths frowned and smiled grotesquely on them from the walls as they moved silently along.
A wide corridor, another short flight of stairs, and then a heavy door, underneath which could be seen a thin streak of light. Pausing here, Una opened it, and the four passed into Squire Garsworth's bedroom, which struck the doctor as being almost as chill and ghostly as the hall.
It was a large room with no carpet on the polished floor, hardly any furniture and no lights, save at the further end, where a candle, standing on a small round table, feebly illuminated a huge curtained bed set on a small square of carpet on which were also the round table aforesaid and two heavy chairs, the whole forming a kind of dismal oasis in the desert of bare floor.