ques Benoix, a roofless, tumbledown
stone cabin which had been from childhood Jacqueline's own particular
playground, as sacred to her as the eyrie to her mother. She called it,
grandiloquently, the Ruin. The place had a sinister reputation, and was
sedulously avoided by both negroes and whites of the neighborhood; which
suited Jacqueline's purposes excellently. All dreamers feel the need of
a hidden place where they may retire, free from the gaze of a not too
sympathetic world; and the Ruin made a strong appeal to the imagination
of Jacqueline.

If the place was haunted, as the neighborhood averred, it was perhaps
not without reason. The cabin had once been a slave-house where an
earlier Kildare kept certain human livestock to be fattened like hogs
for the market, overcrowding and neglecting them, however, as he would
not have dared to neglect and overcrowd hogs, so that the venture was
not altogether successful. Recently, workmen laying drainage pipes
through the ravine had uncovered a long trench filled with many bones,
ghastly witness to the folly of neglecting livestock, human or
otherwise. Cholera was the first ghost to haunt that spot, but it had
left others which were heard about the cabin on windy nights, moaning
and rattling chains and, because they were the ghosts of negroes,
singing.

Jacqueline, unaware of this episode in the proud Kildare history, had
nevertheless been faithfully warned by the negroes of "ha'nts" in the
ravine, which added materially to her pleasure in the place. Not every
budding genius has at her private disposal a haunted ruin; and at this
period of her career Jacqueline was being a budding genius.

Their mother had recently taken both girls to a near-by city for their
first taste of grand opera, completing the effect by the purchase of a
graphophone and opera records. Since that time Jacqueline had nourished
the more or less secret ambition of becoming the world's greatest
_diva_. She had taken to singing in church with an impassioned ardor
which startled, even while it titillated, the ear of the congregation.
As Mrs. Sykes put it, "Folks hadn't ought to sing hymns as if they was
love-songs, no matter how nice it sounds."

Jacqueline had not taken her family, even her adored mother, entirely
into her confidence, having a shrewd conviction that her ambition would
meet with slight encouragement from them. Of late, since the disturbance
about Philip's father, both Jemima and her mothe