like
sensible men, returned an unassailable verdict of "Sudden Death."

The son and heir came into immediate enjoyment of a considerable estate,
but a claim to a large tract of country in Waldo County, Maine, which
the colonel, had he lived, would undoubtedly have made good, was lost by
his decease. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence, and
could not be found. Still, from generation to generation, the Pyncheons
cherished an absurd delusion of family importance on the strength of
this impalpable claim; and from father to son they clung with tenacity
to the ancestral house for the better part of two centuries.

The most noted event in the Pyncheon annals in the last fifty years had
been the violent death of the chief member of the family--an old and
wealthy bachelor. One of his nephews, Clifford, was found guilty of the
murder, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. This had happened
thirty years ago, and there were now rumours that the long-buried
criminal was about to be released. Another nephew had become the heir,
and was now a judge in an inferior court. The only members of the family
known to be extant, besides the judge and the thirty years' prisoner,
were a sister of the latter, wretchedly poor, who lived in the House of
the Seven Gables by the will of the old bachelor, and the judge's single
surviving son, now travelling in Europe. The last and youngest Pyncheon
was a little country girl of seventeen, whose father--another of the
judge's cousins--was dead, and whose mother had taken another husband.

_II.--The House without Sunshine_

Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was reduced to the business of setting up a
pretty shop, and that in the Pyncheon house where she had spent all her
days. After sixty years of idleness and seclusion, she must earn her
bread or starve, and to keep shop was the only resource open to her.

The first customer to cross the threshold was a young man to whom old
Hepzibah let certain remote rooms in the House of the Seven Gables. He
explained that he had looked in to offer his best wishes, and to see if
he could give any assistance.

Poor Hepzibah, when she heard the kindly tone of his voice, began to
sob.

"Ah, Mr. Holgrave," she cried, "I never can go through with it! Never,
never, never! I wish I were dead in the old family tomb with all my
forefathers--yes, and with my brother, who had far better find me there
than here! I am too old, too feeble, and too hopeless!