traverse the village streets,
enter the Japha mansion, remain there an hour and then re-issue with
tremulous steps and bowed head, had become so common a sight to the
village eye, that even the children forgot to ask what her errand was,
or why she held her head so hopefully when she entered, or looked so
despondent when she came forth.

But to Paula, for reasons already mentioned, this secret and persistent
vigil in a forsaken and mysterious dwelling, was fraught with a
significance which had never lost its power either to excite her
curiosity or to arouse her imagination. Many a time had she gone home
from some late encounter with the aged lady, to brood by the hour upon
the expression of that restless eye which in its wanderings never failed
to turn upon her own youthful face and linger there in the manner I have
already noted. She thought of it by night, she thought of it by day. She
felt herself drawn to that woman's suffering heart as by invisible
cords. To understand the feelings of this desolate being, she had even
studied the face of that old house, until she knew it under its every
aspect. Often in shutting her eyes at night, she would perceive as in a
mirror a vision of its long gray front, barred door and sealed windows
shining in the moon, save where the deep impenetrable shadows of its two
guardian poplars lay black and dismal upon its ghostly surface. Again
she would behold it as it reared itself dark and dripping in a blinding
storm, its walls plastered with leaves from the immovable poplars, and
its neglected garden lying sodden and forlorn under the flail of the
ceaseless storm. Then its early morning face would strike her fancy. The
slow looming of its chimney-tops against a brightening sky; the gradual
coming out of its forsaken windows and solemn looking doors from the
mystery of darkness into the no less mystery of day; the hint of
roselight on its barren boards; the gleam of sunshine on its untrodden
threshold; a sunshine as pure and sweet as if a bride stood there in her
beauty, waiting for admission into the deserted halls beyond. All and
everything that could tend to invest the house and its constant visitor
with an atmosphere of awe and interest, had occurred to this young girl
in her daily reveries and nightly dreams. It was therefore with a thrill
deep as her expectation and vivid as her sympathy, that she recognized
in her eager interlocutor and proposed confident, the woman about whose
lif