a tiny rushing
brooklet as his own woods knew, and beyond, alas, the glaring foreguard
of a "new neighborhood"; raw red villas, semi-detached, and then a row
of lamentable shops.

But as he was about to turn back, in the hope of finding some other
outlet, his attention was charmed by a small house that stood back a
little from the road on his right hand. There had been a white gate, but
the paint had long faded to grey and black, an the wood crumbled under
the touch, and only moss marked out the lines of the drive. The iron
railing round the lawn had fallen, and the poor flower-beds were choked
with grass and a faded growth of weeds. But here and there a rosebush
lingered amidst suckers that had sprung grossly from the root, and on
each side of the hall door were box trees, untrimmed, ragged, but still
green. The slate roof was all stained and livid, blotched with the
drippings of a great elm that stood at one corner of the neglected lawn,
and marks of damp and decay were thick on the uneven walls, which had
been washed yellow many years before. There was a porch of trellis work
before the door, and Lucian had seen it rock in the wind, swaying as if
every gust must drive it down. There were two windows on the ground
floor, one on each side of the door, and two above, with a blind space
where a central window had been blocked up.

This poor and desolate house had fascinated him. Ancient and poor and
fallen, disfigured by the slate roof and the yellow wash that had
replaced the old mellow dipping tiles and the warm red walls, and
disfigured again by spots and patches of decay; it seemed as if its happy
days were for ever ended. To Lucian it appealed with a sense of doom and
horror; the black streaks that crept upon the walls, and the green drift
upon the roof, appeared not so much the work of foul weather and dripping
boughs, as the outward signs of evil working and creeping in the lives
of those within.

The stage seemed to him decked for doom, painted with the symbols of
tragedy; and he wondered as he looked whether any one were so unhappy as
to live there still. There were torn blinds in the windows, but he had
asked himself who could be so brave as to sit in that room, darkened by
the dreary box, and listen of winter nights to the rain upon the window,
and the moaning of wind amongst the tossing boughs that beat against the
roof.

He could not imagine that any chamber in such a house was habitable. Here
the dead