inhabited or not.

Accordingly, when she entered the house for the third time, she plucked
a wild rose and threw one of its buds into the pitcher of water on the
table, a second on the bear skin coverlet of the bed and a third, fourth
and fifth she stuck into the barrels of the muskets hanging up in the
armour room.

When now, she visited the lonely house for the fourth time, she looked
for the rose buds and could not find one of them in the places where
she had put them. Consequently there must needs be someone who slept in
the bed, drank the fresh water from the pitcher and used the firearms.

Her thirst for knowledge now induced her to enquire of her husband
concerning this little dwelling and he, then and there, elucidated the
mystery.

It was quite true that a lonely inhabitant of this house had once been
murdered there, that the common people believed it to be haunted, and
that consequently not one of them would cross its threshold at any price
either by day or by night. An old landed proprietor from the mining town
of X., who owned a small strip of forest in those parts and was at the
same time an enthusiastic huntsman, had taken advantage of this popular
superstition to buy this little house, for a mere song. He used it as a
hunting box. He could not afford to keep a huntsman of his own to look
after it and knowing that if he locked it up, thieves would most
probably break into it and steal everything, he left the doors wide open
and everyone instantly avoided it as uncanny. The reason Henrietta never
met him was that this old gentleman was a government official, who had
to live most of his time in the town of Klausenburg, but whenever he was
not hunting here he was out in the forests all night till dawn when he
turned into the little house for a nap and was off again before the
afternoon; and so Henrietta who regularly visited the hut in the
afternoon, naturally never encountered him.

Leonard even named the old gentleman's name and then Henrietta
remembered meeting him at the _soirees_ at Klausenburg. Leonard,
however, warned his wife never to mention the matter in the presence of
the old gentleman in question, if she should ever meet him, for he had
sundry relations with poachers and other people of that sort. The fact
was, his own strip of forest was not very large and therefore he very
frequently trespassed on Leonard's property in pursuit of game. The old
gentleman was, therefore, very desirous to kee