This certainly had the true Hollister touch! Miss Octavia herself could not have devised a more delightful scheme.
"And so," Mr. Bassford Hollister concluded, "I naturally incline toward Arrowood, though he is so poor that he was obliged to come over in the steerage to continue his wooing of my daughter."
He let himself down into the dark trunk-room, waited for me courteously, and walked by my side to the stairway, both of us maintaining silence. I was deeply curious to know how he had entered and whether he expected to go down the front way and out the main door. We kept together to the third-floor hall,--I could have sworn to that; then suddenly, just as we reached the stairway, out went the lights, and we were in utter darkness. I smothered an exclamation, clutched my matches and struck a light, and as the stick flamed slowly, I looked about for Bassford Hollister; but he had vanished as suddenly and completely as though a trap had yawned beneath us and swallowed him. I found the third-floor switch and it responded immediately, flooding the stair-well to the lower hall, but I neither saw nor heard anything more of Hollister.
Astounded by this performance, I continued on to the lower floor to have a look around, and there, calmly reading by the library table, sat Miss Octavia!
"Late hours, Mr. Ames!" she cried. "I supposed you had retired long ago."
I was still the least bit ruffled by that last transaction on the stair, and I demanded a little curtly:--
"Pardon my troubling you; but may I inquire, Miss Hollister, how long you have been sitting here?"
The clock on the stair began to strike twelve, and she listened composedly to a few of the deep-toned strokes before replying.
"Just half an hour. I thought some one knocked at my door about an hour ago. The lights were on and I came down, saw a magazine that had escaped my eye before, and here you find me."
"I thought so. You know, the servants have an idea that the place is haunted, and I thought that if I sat here the ghost might take it upon himself to walk. I confess to a slight disappointment that it is only you who have appeared. I suppose it was n't you who knocked at my door?"
"No," I replied, laughing a little at her manner, "not unless it was you who switched off the lights as I was coming down from the fourth floor. I have been studying this chimney from the roof. I know something of the ways of electric switches, and they don't usually move of their own accord."