It was too much. She dropped the tray on the table with a crash and gave vent to a piercing shriek that would have shamed the siren of a fire engine.
Miss Cornelia and Anderson, rushing in from the hall and the billiard room respectively, each with a lighted candle, found her gasping and clutching at the table for support.
"For the love of heaven, what's wrong?" cried Miss Cornelia irritatedly. The coffeepot she was carrying in her other hand spilled a portion of its boiling contents on Lizzie's shoe and Lizzie screamed anew and began to dance up and down on the uninjured foot.
"Oh, my foot--my foot!" she squealed hysterically. "My foot!"
Miss Cornelia tried to shake her back to her senses.
"My patience! Did you yell like that because you stubbed your toe?"
"You scalded it!" cried Lizzie wildly. "It went up the staircase!"
"Your toe went up the staircase?"
"No, no! An eye--an eye as big as a saucer! It ran right up that staircase--" She indicated the alcove with a trembling forefinger. Miss Cornelia put her coffeepot and her candle down on the table and opened her mouth to express her frank opinion of her factotum's sanity. But here the detective took charge.
"Now see here," he said with some sternness to the quaking Lizzie, "stop this racket and tell me what you saw!"
"A ghost!" persisted Lizzie, still hopping around on one leg. "It came right through that door and ran up the stairs--oh--" and she seemed prepared to scream again as Dale, white-faced, came in from the hall, followed by Billy and Brooks, the latter holding still another candle.
"Who screamed?" said Dale tensely.
"I did!" Lizzie wailed, "I saw a ghost!" She turned to Miss Cornelia. "I begged you not to come here," she vociferated. "I begged you on my bended knees. There's a graveyard not a quarter of a mile away."
"Yes, and one more scare like that, Lizzie Allen, and you'll have me lying in it," said her mistress unsympathetically. She moved up to examine the scene of Lizzie's ghostly misadventure, while Anderson began to interrogate its heroine.
"Now, Lizzie," he said, forcing himself to urbanity, "what did you really see?"
"I told you what I saw."
His manner grew somewhat threatening.
"You're not trying to frighten Miss Van Gorder into leaving this house and going back to the city?"
"Well, if I am," said Lizzie with grim, unconscious humor, "I'm giving myself an awful good scare, too, ain't I?"
The two glared at each other as Miss Cornelia returned from her survey of the alcove.
"Somebody who had a key could have got in here, Mr. Anderson," she said annoyedly. "That terrace door's been unbolted from the inside."