indly received, and not in any case
returned. And the report went around the neighborhood, that Philip
Dubarry was as morose and selfish as his father had been before him. And
so the house was abandoned, as it had been in the days of the old man
and the idiot girl.

"But by and by other rumors, darker and more dishonorable to the master
and mistress of Shut-up Dubarry, crept out among the people. These
rumors were started by the Dubarry servants, in their gossipping with
other family servants in the chance meeting in church or village. They
were to the effect that Philip Dubarry often quarrelled fiercely with
his gipsy wife, and even threatened to send her back to her native
county, and that Gentiliska, or Iska, as she was more commonly called,
wept and raved and tore her black hair by turns.

"It is the old sad tale, dear Sybil. At length the cultivated scholar
and unprincipled villain grew tired of his beautiful but ignorant gipsy
wife, who was a wife only in justice and not in law. He frequently left
home for long absences. He spent his winters in the cities, and his
summers in a round of visits to hospitable country houses, leaving her
at all seasons to pine and weep, or rage and tear her hair in the gloomy
solitude of Shut-up Dubarry. But for all this, whenever he did
condescend to visit his home, she received him with an eagerness of
welcome--a perfect self-abandonment to joy, that knew no bounds. And
when he left her again, her despair was but the deeper, her anguish the
fiercer. And all this was duly reported by that indefatigable corps of
reporters, the domestics of the house.

"At last came the crisis. Philip Dubarry sent down an agent who opened
the doors of Shut-up Dubarry, and brought into it an army of workmen, to
repair, refurnish and decorate the mansion-house. In vain Gentiliska
asked questions; the workmen either could not or would not give her any
satisfaction. 'It was the master's orders,' they said, and nothing more.
To no one in the world were 'the master's' orders more sacred than to
his loyal gipsy wife. She bowed in submission, and let the workmen do
their will. All the summer season was occupied with the work. But by the
first of October the house was thoroughly renewed, within and without,
so that it seemed like a palace in the midst of Paradise; and the gipsy
wife wandered through the house and grounds in a delight that was only
damped by the long-continued absence of her husband.

"At le