‘I’ve talked to her for hours about Mrs Hatch-Mallard’s uncle,’ said his wife, ‘and pointed out the exact spot where he killed himself, and invented all sorts of impressive details, and I’ve found an old portrait of Lord John Russell and put it in her room, and told her that it’s supposed to be a picture of the uncle in middle age. If Ada does see a ghost at all it certainly ought to be old Hatch-Mallard’s. At any rate, we’ve done our best.’

The precautions were in vain. On the third morning of her stay Ada Bleek came down late to breakfast, her eyes looking very tired, but ablaze with excitement, her hair done anyhow, and a large brown volume hugged under her arm.

‘At last I’ve seen something supernatural!’ she exclaimed, and gave Mrs Norbury a fervent kiss, as though in gratitude for the opportunity afforded her.

‘A ghost!’ cried Mrs Norbury, ‘not really!’

‘Really and unmistakably!’

‘Was it an oldish man in the dress of about fifty years ago?’ asked Mrs Norbury hopefully.

‘Nothing of the sort,’ said Ada; ‘it was a white hedgehog.’

‘A white hedgehog!’ exclaimed both the Norburys, in tones of disconcerted astonishment.

‘A huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes,’ said Ada; ‘I was lying half asleep in bed when suddenly I felt a sensation as of something sinister and unaccountable passing through the room. I sat up and looked round, and there, under the window, I saw an evil, creeping thing, a sort of monstrous hedgehog, of a dirty white colour, with black, loathsome claws that clicked and scraped along the floor, and narrow, yellow eyes of indescribable evil. It slithered along for a yard or two, always looking at me with its cruel, hideous eyes, then, when it reached the second window, which was open, it clambered up the sill and vanished. I got up at once and went to the window; there wasn’t a sign of it anywhere. Of course, I knew it must be something from another world, but it was not till I turned up Popple’s chapter on local traditions that I realised what I had seen.’

She turned eagerly to the large brown volume and read: ‘ “Nicholas Herison, an old miser, was hung at Batchford in 1763 for the murder of a farm lad who had accidentally discovered his secret hoard. His ghost is supposed to traverse the countryside, appearing sometimes as a white owl, sometimes as a huge white hedgehog.”

‘I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that made you think you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake,’ said Mrs Norbury, hazarding a conjecture that probably came very near the truth.

Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her apparition.

‘This must be hushed up,’ said Mrs Norbury quickly; ‘the servants—’

‘Hushed up!’ exclaimed Ada, indignantly; ‘I’m writing a long report on it for the Research Society.’

It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of brilliant resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his life.

‘It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek,’ he said, ‘but it would be a shame to let it go further. That white hedgehog is an old joke of ours; stuffed albino hedgehog, you know, that my father brought home from Jamaica, where they grow to enormous size. We hide it in the room with a string on it, run one end of the string through the window; then we pull it from below and it comes scraping along the floor, just as you’ve described, and finally jerks out of the window. Taken in heaps of people; they all read up Popple