under her orders had a hard time of it. There was a dismal kind of
neatness about everything, and a bleak empty look in the sparsely
furnished rooms, which wore no pleasant sign of occupation, no look of
home. The humblest cottage, with four tiny square rooms and a thatched
roof, and just a patch of old-fashioned garden with a sweetbrier hedge
and roses growing here and there among the cabbages; would have been a
pleasanter habitation than Wyncomb, Ellen Carley thought.

Mr. Whitelaw exhibited an unwonted liberality upon this occasion. The
dinner was a ponderous banquet, and the dessert a noble display of nuts
and oranges, figs and almonds and raisins, flanked by two old-fashioned
decanters of port and sherry; and both the bailiff and his host did ample
justice to the feast. It was a long dreary afternoon of eating and
drinking; and Ellen was not sorry to get away from the prim wainscoted
parlour, where her father and Mr. Whitelaw were solemnly sipping their
wine, to wander over the house with Mrs. Tadman.

It was about four o'clock when she slipped quietly out of the room at
that lady's invitation, and the lobbies and long passages had a shadowy
look in the declining light. There was light enough for her to see the
rooms, however; for there were no rare collections of old china, no
pictures or adornments of any kind, to need a minute inspection.

"It's a fine old place, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Tadman. "There's not many
farmers can boast of such a house as Wyncomb."

"It's large enough," Ellen answered, with a tone which implied the
reverse of admiration; "but it's not a place I should like to live in.
I'm not one to believe in ghosts or such nonsense, but if I could have
any such foolish thoughts, I should have them here. The house looks as if
it was haunted, somehow."

Mrs. Tadman laughed a shrill hard laugh, and rubbed her skinny hands with
an air of satisfaction.

"You're not easy to please, Miss Carley," she said; "most folks think a
deal of Wyncomb; for, you see, it's only them that live in a house as can
know how dull it is; and as to the place being haunted, I never heard
tell of anything of that kind. The Whitelaws ain't the kind of people to
come back to this world, unless they come to fetch their money, and then
they'd come fast enough, I warrant. I used to see a good deal of my
uncle, John Whitelaw, when I was a girl, and never did a son take after
his father closer than my cousin Stephen takes after hi