THERE were two topics of interest agitating the town. One was the appearance of a new hermit in the old cave on the mountain side, and the other, the sale of the Unwin mansion and the prospective removal of Frederick Unwin’s widow and son into the haunted house of the Earles. The latter occasioned the greater amount of talk. That this move on their part was but the preliminary step to a marriage between Clarke and the young heiress had been known for some time. But to see a house so long deserted reopened, its doors and windows thrown wide to the sun, and the smoke rising once more from its desolate chimneys, was an event calculated to interest all who had felt the indescribable awe surrounding a place abandoned by human life while yet possessing all the appointments of a home.

Polly, who for some reason had given up her former plan of renting the big Izard place, was full of business and glowing with the excitement of what was considered by many in the town a rather daring venture. Even Dr. Izard, who was not wont to show emotion, looked startled when he heard of her intentions, and seemed disposed to forbid the young girl letting a house so given over to damp and mildew. But when she urged the necessity of providing Mrs. Unwin with an immediate home and hinted at the reluctance which that lady had shown to living at the other end of the village, he relented and merely insisted that the place should be thoroughly aired and renovated before Mrs. Unwin went into it. As he was not that lady’s physician, had never been even a visitor at the Unwin mansion, he could say no more. But Polly needed no further hint, and went back to her own humble home with the most generous projects in her head for Mrs. Unwin’s future comfort and happiness.

It was a great day in Hamilton when she and Clarke and five or six interested neighbors first threw open the creaking front door of the Earle cottage and let the sunlight stream into its hushed interior. To her, who had never been permitted to enter the place since she had been taken from it fourteen years before, it was an event merely to press her foot on the worm-eaten carpets and slide her fingers along the walls that had once felt the touch of her parents’ garments. Each room was a revelation, each corner a surprise. She glided from hall to chamber and from chamber to hall like the spirit of a younger age introduced into the memorials of a long-departed one. Her fresh cheek, from which even awe could not quite banish the dimples, looked out of place and yet strangely beautiful amid the dim surroundings of the stiffly-ordered rooms and old-fashioned furnishings.

With an instinct natural enough under the circumstances, she had wished to be the first to enter the house and cross the threshold of each apartment. But Clarke was not far behind her. In front of the portrait of her father she paused and drew her friends around her.

“Oh!” she cried; “it was wrong to keep this from me; I should have been brought up under the influence of that face.” But as she further contemplated it, her first enthusiasm faded and an indescribable look of vague distrust stole into her rosy countenance, and robbed it of half its joyousness. “I—I wish there was a picture of my mother here,” she whispered to Clarke, whose arm she had nervously seized. “She had a beautiful face, they say, all gentleness and goodness.”

“Perhaps we shall find one upstairs,” he suggested, turning to open more windows.

“Oh, it is cold,” she murmured, and moved with quite an unaccustomed air of gravity toward the staircase. Her mother’s room, with its many suggestions of days which were not entirely forgotten by her, seemed to restore her mental balance, shaken by that short contemplation of her father’s portrait. She wept as her eyes fell upon the bed where she had last seen the outstretched form of her dying mother; but her tears were tender and quite unlike, both in their source and effect, the shuddering recoil which had seized her after she had gazed a few minutes at her father’s pictured face.

The book which a certain hand had hesitated to touch not so very long ago, she took up, and opening with some difficulty the pages which time and dampness had glued together, she showed Clarke these words, written on one of the blank leaves in front:

“My mother’s writing, I know! What a difference in our dispositions! Where do you suppose I got my cheerful temperament from? Not from my father?” And again she faintly shuddered.

“Your father’s desk is in the other room,” commented somebody. Looking up she laid the book softly down and prepared to leave the one spot in the house of which she had any remembrance. “I shall hate to see this dust removed, or these articles touched. Do you think I could be allowed to do the first handling? It is so like a sacrilege to give it over to some stranger.”

But Clarke shook his head. “I have let you come with us into this damp house because it seemed only proper that your eyes should be the first to meet its desolation. I shall not let you remain here one moment after we are gone. If I were willing, Dr. Izard would not be; so do not think of it again.”

The name of the doctor seemed to awaken in her a strange chain of thought.

“Ah, Dr. Izard! He was standing beside my father when he closed my mother’s eyes. Why did he not come with me this morning to see me open the house? I begged him to do so but he declined quite peremptorily.”

“Dr. Izard does not like me,” remarked Clarke sententiously.

“Does not like you? Why?” queried Polly innocently, pausing on the threshold they were crossing.

“I do not know: he has always avoided me, more than he has other people, I mean—and once when I spoke to him, the strangest expression crossed his face.”

“I do not understand. He has always been very kind to me. Are you sure that you like him?”

“I am indifferent to him; that is, I admire him, as everyone must who has eyes and an understanding. But I have no feeling toward him; he does not seem to have any place in my life.”

“He has in mine,” she reluctantly admitted. “I often go to him for advice.”

“Was it by his advice,” whispered Clarke, bending till his mouth touched her ear, “that you gave me your heart?”

The little hand that lay on his arm drew itself slowly out and fell quite softly and significantly on her heaving breast.

“No,” said she. “I have another adviser here, fully as powerful as he can ever be.”

The gesture, the accent were so charming that he was provoked at the peering curiosity of the persons accompanying them. He would have liked to kiss those rosy lips for the sweetest thing they had ever said.

Had the midnight visitor of a few weeks back known what a careless crowd would soon invade these hidden premises he might not have been so wary in his movements. When Polly reached her father’s desk, she found one or two neighbors there before her.

“Oh, look at this curious old inkstand!” exclaimed one.

“And at this pile of note-books standing just where Ephraim Earle must have laid them down!”

“And at this pen with the ink dried on it!”

“And at this ridiculous little China shepherdess pursing up her lips as if she knew the whole mystery but would not tell!”

Polly, whose ears had been more or less closed by the episode with Clarke just above mentioned, seemed scarcely to hear their words. She stood by her father’s work-table with her hand on her father’s chair, in a dream of love that moistened her down-cast eyes and awakened strange, tremulous movements in the corners of her sensitive lips. But soon the tokens of past ambition and of interrupted labor everywhere apparent, began to influence her spirits, and her looks showed a depression which was nothing less than startling to Clarke. Even the neighbors observed it and moved chattering away, so that in a few minutes Polly and Clarke were left standing alone in this former scene of her father’s toil and triumphs.

“What is the matter, my darling?” he now asked, seeing her turn away from the very objects he supposed would interest her most.

“I do not know,” she answered. “I do not like this room; I do not like the effect it has upon me.” Had the gliding visitant whose shadow had last fallen on these walls left some baleful influence behind him, or was the cause of her distrust of deeper origin and such as she hardly dared admit to herself?

“The air is close here,” remarked Clarke; “and the presence of all this dust is enough to stifle anyone. Let us go down into the garden and get a breath of fresh air.”

She pointed to the open windows. “How can it be close with all this light pouring in? No, no, it is not that; I am simply frightened. Did you ever stop to think?” she suddenly inquired, “what I should do or how I should feel if—if my father came back?”

“No,” he replied startled. “No one supposes him to be alive. Why should you have such morbid thoughts?”

“I do not know.” She laughed and endeavored to throw off the shadow that had fallen upon her. “You must think me very superstitious, but I would not walk down that rear passage for anything; not even with you, I should expect to encounter a tall, military-looking figure, with a face pleasing enough at first sight, but which would not bear close scrutiny. A face like the painted one below,” she added, with an involuntary shudder.

“But that is not a bad face; it is only a keen and daring one. I like it very much. I remember my mother has always said you inherited your beauty from your father.”

But this seemed to irritate her indescribably. “No, no,” she cried, shaking her head and almost stamping her little foot. “I don’t believe it and I won’t have it!” Then, as if startled by her own vehemence, she blushed and dragged him away toward the door. “He may have been handsome, but I have not eyes like his, I am sure. If I could only see how my mother looked.”

In the hall below they paused. There was much to be said concerning the contemplated alterations to be made in the house, but she did not seem to take any interest in the matter. Evidently the effect of her visit upstairs had not entirely left her, for just as they were turning toward the door she gave an involuntary look behind her, and laughing, to show her sense of the foolishness of her own words, she cried:

“So we did not meet my father’s ghost after all. Well now, I may be sure that his interest is in other scenes and that he will never come back here.” As she spoke a shadow crossed the open doorway.

“Do not be too sure of anything!” interposed a voice, and a strange but by no means attractive looking man stepped calmly into the house and paused with a low bow before her.