ith a clear, cold little spring
still bubbling away as merrily in its granite basin, as if all the
Hyndses were not dead and gone. And there was a deep well, protected
by a round stone wall, with a cupola-like roof supported by four
slender pillars. And everything was dank and weedy and splotched
with mildew and with mold.

_O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is Haunted!_

When we opened the great front door, above which was the fan-light
of Alicia's hope, just as the round front porch had the big pillars,
a damp and moldy air met us. The house had not been opened since
Sophronisba's funeral, and everything--stairs, settles, tables,
cabinets, pictures, the chairs backed inhospitably against the wall
as if to prevent anybody from sitting in them--was covered with a
shrouding pall of dust.

The hall was cross-shaped, the side passage running between the back
drawing-room and library on one side, and the dining-room and two
locked rooms on the other. It was a nice place, that side passage,
with a fireplace and settles; and beautiful windows opening upon the
tangled garden. All the down-stairs walls were paneled: precious
woods were not so hard to come by when Hynds House was built. It was
lovely, of course, but depressingly dark.

We got one of the big windows open, and let some stale damp air out
and some fresh damp air in. Then, having despatched our hackman for
certain necessities, Alicia and I turned and stared at each other,
another Alicia and Sophy staring back at us from a dim and dusty
mirror opposite. If, at that moment, I could have heard the familiar
buzzer at my elbow! If I could have heard the good everyday New York
"Miss Smith, attend to this, please"! God wot, if I had not
literally burned my bridges behind me--Oh, oh, I had!

"The garden around this house,"--Alicia spoke in a
whisper--"stretches to the end of the world and then laps over. It
hasn't been trimmed since Adam and Eve moved out. But those
crape-myrtle trees are quite the loveliest things left over from
Paradise, and I'm glad we came here to see them with our own eyes!
Brace up, Sophy! We'll feel heaps better when we've had something to
eat. Aren't you frightfully hungry, and doesn't a chill suspicion
strike you, somewhere around the wishbone, that if that Ancient
Mariner of a hackman doesn't get ba