Towards midnight, Miss Grimshaw was awakened from her slumbers by a sound as of some person weeping and wailing. She sat up in bed and listened. It was Effie's voice, and she heard her own name called repeatedly.

"Miss Grimshaw! Miss Grimshaw! Miss Grimshaw!"

In a moment she was out of bed and wrapped in a dressing-gown. The next, she was in Effie's room.

The child was sitting up in bed in the moonlight. Her subliminal mind had constructed a nightmare out of a gallows, a guilty conscience, and a stolen postage-stamp.

"I took it out of the drawer of the writing-desk. I didn't mean it. I did it for fun," cried Effie, her face buried in the girl's shoulder. "And I dreamt. Ow! Ow!"

"What on earth's the matter?"

It was Mr. French, in a dressing-gown, with a lighted candle in his hand.

You cannot weep and wail in a pitch-pine bungalow, resonant as a fiddle, without disturbing the other occupants, and behind Mr. French moved figures dimly suggestive of the chorus of the Greek drama waiting to come on.

"I don't know what the matter is," said Miss Grimshaw, her mind divided between Effie and a feeling of thankfulness that she had her slippers on. "She seems to have taken a postage stamp or some nonsense. It's night terror. Now, Effie, don't stop crying if you feel you want to, but just tell me it all. Once you have told me it all, the bad things will go away."

"I stuck it on the letter," sobbed Effie, who had passed from the howling to the blubbering stage, "an' I stuck the letter in the box; and I dreamt Mr. Chopping and the p'leeceman were going to hang me."

"Well, they aren't. Mr. Chopping and the policeman are in bed. So it was a letter? And how about the letter your father gave you to post?"

"I never gave her a letter," put in Mr. French.

"I only made it up," said Effie. "Father never gave me anything. It was only my letter to Cousin Dick."

"Your what?" said French, who had taken his seat on the end of the bed, and was now holding the flat candlestick so that the candle-light showed up Effie with Rembrandtesque effect.

"I wrote to make an April fool of him."

"What did you say?" asked French; and there was a tension in his voice unperceived by his daughter, but very evident to Miss Grimshaw, and even to Norah and Mrs. Driscoll, who were listening outside.

"I only said 'April fool,'" replied Effie, who had passed now into the sniffling stage, a wan smile lighting up her countenance.

"Did you put any address on the paper?"

"No. You remember, when I wrote to him last year on the 1st of April, and you said I ought to put 'April ass'? Well, I put 'April fool' just the same as then."

"He'll know her writing," groaned French, speaking aloud, yet to himself. Then, as if fearing to trust himself to speak to the child, he turned and told the servants in the passage to be gone to their beds.

"Come with me," he said to Miss Grimshaw, when Effie had at last lain down, eased of her sin and its terrors, "come into the sitting-room."

They went into the sitting-room, and Mr. French put his candle on the table.

"Here's a kettle of fish," said he.

"She put no address on the paper," said Miss Grimshaw, "but——"

"The post-mark."

"Yes, the post-mark. I was thinking of that. There is one comfort, however; the post-mark may be illegible. You know how difficult it is to read a post-mark very often."

"Listen to me," said French, with dramatic emphasis. "This post-mark won't be illegible; it will be as plain as Nelson's pillar. I know it, for it's just this sort of thing that happens in life, and happens to me. The letter won't get lost; if the mail packet was to sink, a shark would rout it out from the mail-bags and swallow it, and get caught, and be cut open, and the letter would go on by next mail. We're done."

"Don't lose heart."

"We're done. I know it. And to think, after all our plotting and planning, that a child's tomfoolery would come, after all, to ruin me. I could skin her alive when I think of it."

He stopped suddenly and turned. A little white figure stood at the door. It was Effie. Seized with an overwhelming spirit of righteousness, hearing her father's voice colloguing, and touched with desire for adventure and a kiss, she had bundled out of bed and run into the sitting-room.

"I want a kiss," said Effie.

The next moment she was in her father's arms, and he was kissing her as though she had brought him a fortune, instead of ruin.

The next moment she was gone, seeking her warm bed rapidly, and as the sound of her pattering feet died away the girl turned to French, her eyes filled with tears.

"We aren't done," said she, speaking rapidly and with vehemence. "We'll get the better of them yet. We'll do something, and we have time to prepare our defence against them, for the letter won't reach Cloyne till the day after to-morrow."

"If they manage to do me in this," said French, "I'll shoot Garryowen with my own hand, and I'll hang for Dick Giveen, by heavens!"

"Hush! There is no use in giving way to anger. We must have a council of war, and collect all our forces. I say——"

"Yes?"

"Mr. Dashwood——"

The girl paused for a moment, then, as if the desperate nature of the situation made everything else of small account, she went on:

"Mr. Dashwood behaved very foolishly the other day, and ran away off to town. We must send him a wire to-morrow morning to come at once. I'll send it. And look here. You know how grumpy I was after tea. Well, Effie, in that fit of lying, told me you had given her a letter to post which she was to hide from me. Of course, I ought to have known you wouldn't do anything of the sort. I apologise. Goodnight."

They had been talking to each other attired only in their dressing-gowns and slippers. If Crowsnest society could have seen them, its doors would have been shut against them from that night forth for evermore.