had lain, through the white blind the thin light had filtered on
the rigid mouth, and still the floor must be wet with tears and still
that great rocking elm echoed the groaning and the sobs of those who
watched. No doubt, the damp was rising, and the odor of the earth filled
the house, and made such as entered draw back, foreseeing the hour of
death.

Often the thought of this strange old house had haunted him; he had
imagined the empty rooms where a heavy paper peeled from the walls and
hung in dark strips; and he could not believe that a light ever shone
from those windows that stared black and glittering on the neglected
lawn. But tonight the wet and the storm seemed curiously to bring the
image of the place before him, and as the wind sounded he thought how
unhappy those must be, if any there were, who sat in the musty chambers
by a flickering light, and listened to the elm-tree moaning and beating
and weeping on the walls.

And tonight was Saturday night; and there was about that phrase something
that muttered of the condemned cell, of the agony of a doomed man.
Ghastly to his eyes was the conception of any one sitting in that room to
the right of the door behind the larger box tree, where the wall was
cracked above the window and smeared with a black stain in an ugly shape.

He knew how foolish it had been in the first place to trouble his mind
with such conceits of a dreary cottage on the outskirts of London. And it
was more foolish now to meditate these things, fantasies, feigned forms,
the issue of a sad mood and a bleak day of spring. For soon, in a few
moments, he was to rise to a new life. He was but reckoning up the
account of his past, and when the light came he was to think no more of
sorrow and heaviness, of real or imagined terrors. He had stayed too long
in London, and he would once more taste the breath of the hills, and see
the river winding in the long lovely valley; ah! he would go home.

Something like a thrill, the thrill of fear, passed over him as he
remembered that there was no home. It was in the winter, a year and a
half after his arrival in town, that he had suffered the loss of his
father. He lay for many days prostrate, overwhelmed with sorrow and with
the thought that now indeed he was utterly alone in the world. Miss
Deacon was to live with another cousin in Yorkshire; the old home was at
last ended and done. He felt sorry that he had not written more
frequently to his father: there