ght Paula, and felt a strange thrill as she
realized that even at that moment, the woman with the eager but restless
eyes, was shut within the precincts of that deserted dwelling, engaged
in prayer, perhaps wet with tears, who knows? The secret of what she did
in that long and quiet twilight hour had never been revealed. Leaving
the little brown house behind, Paula found herself insensibly taking the
road to the Japha mansion. If she could not enter it and share the watch
of the devoted woman who had promised her her confidence, she could at
least observe if the windows were open or the blinds raised. To be sure
she ought to be at home, but Miss Belinda was indulgent and did not
question her comings and goings too closely. An irresistible force drew
her down the street, and she did not hesitate to follow the lead of her
impulse. No one accosted her now, it was the tea hour in most of these
houses and the streets were comparatively deserted. The only house whose
chimneys lacked the rising smoke, was the one towards which her
footsteps were tending. She could descry it from afar. Its gaunt walls
from which the paint had long ago faded, stared uncompromisingly upon
her in the autumn sunshine. There was no welcome in its close shutters
with their broken slats from which hung tangled strips of old rags--the
remnants of some boy's kite. The stiff and solemn poplars rose grim and
forbidding at the gate once swung wide to the fashion and gallantry of
proud ladies and stalwart gentlemen, but now pushed aside solely by the
hand of a tremulous old woman, or the irreverent palm of some daring
school-boy. From the tangled garden looked forth neither flower nor
blossoming shrub. Beauty and grace could not thrive in this wilderness
of decay. A dandelion would have felt itself out of place beneath the
eye of that ghostly door, with the sinister plank nailed across it, like
the separating line between light and darkness, right and wrong, life
and death. What loneliness! what a monument of buried passions outliving
death itself!

Paula paused as she reached the gate; but remembering that Mrs. Hamlin
was accustomed to enter the house by a side door, hurried around the
corner and carefully surveyed the windows from that quarter. One of the
shutters was open, allowing the flame of the setting sun to gild the
panes like gold. She did not know then nor has she been able to explain
since, what it was that came over her at the sight, but almost