CHAPTER III





The Aubyn family occupied only a portion of the enormous rectory.
There was a whole floor upstairs, and there were several rooms on
the ground and first floors, that were never used, were unfurnished
except for odds and ends of lumber left behind by the previous
vicar, and were never entered. Rosalie once explored them all,
systematically though very fearfully, and also very excitedly. She
was searching for some one, for two people.

In the household she knew her father and her mother, her brothers
and sisters and the servants; but there were two mysterious
inhabitants of whom she often heard but whom she never saw and
never could find. It used to frighten her sometimes, lying awake at
night, or creeping about the house of an evening, to think of those
two mysterious people hidden away somewhere and perhaps likely to
pounce on her out of the dark. What did they eat? Where did they
live? What did they do? What were they?

One of these two eerie and invisible people was heard of from
her father. Several times Rosalie had heard him, when talking to