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
if from below and it comes scraping along the floor, just as you've
described, and finally jerks out of the window.
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