wn could be and live. He began following a secondary road
out into the countryside.

The countryside, of course, was filled with country, in the shape of
hills, birds, trees, flowers, grass and other distractions to the
passing motorist. It took Malone quite a bit longer than he expected
to find the place he was looking for, and he finally came to the sad
conclusion that country estates are just as difficult to find as
houses in Brooklyn. In both cases, he thought, there was the same
frantic search down what seemed to be a likely route, the same
disappointment when the route turned out to lead nowhere, and the same
discovery that no one had ever heard of the place and, in fact,
doubted very strongly whether it even existed.

But he found it at last, rounding a curve in a narrow black-top road
and spotting the house beyond a grove of trees. He recognized it
instantly.

He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.

It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
half-expected Scarlett O'Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
moment.

Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
the Psychical Research Society.

But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter
of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
the house, nor, Malone thought as he remembered _Gone With the Wind,_
were there any horses or carriages.

The place looked deserted.

Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
originally commanding a huge plantation. Now, all that remained of
that vast parcel of land was the few acres that surrounded the house.

But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
hundred-and-fifty-year-old struct