She was a slight girl, and to those who had seen her every day for the last dozen years she was simply prettier than usual, but to the two or three strangers observing her she was a vision of madcap beauty that for the moment made every other woman previously seen forgotten. Her face, which was heart-shaped and fresh as a newly-opened rose, was flushed with laughter, and the dimples which came and went with every breath so distracted the eye that it was not till she had turned her lovely countenance aside that one remembered the violet hues in her heavily-lashed eyes and the hints of feeling which emanated from them. That, with all the dignities of her new-born heirship upon her, she swung a white sunbonnet on her delicate forefinger was characteristic of the girl. The hair thus revealed to sight was of a glistening chestnut, whose somewhat rumpled curls were deliciously in keeping with the saucy poise of the unquiet head. Altogether a decided gleam of sunshine, made all the more conspicuously bright from the hints just given of the tragic history of her parents and the shadows surrounding the very gift which had called up all this pleasure into her face. “What did she say?” whispered more than one voice as the landlady came slowly back. “She invited me to visit her, and hinted that she had something to tell me,” was the somewhat important reply. “And when are you going?” asked one more eager than the rest. “I may go back with her when she returns from Dr. Izard’s,” was the cool and consequential response. Evidently the landlady had been raised in her own estimation by the notice given her by this former little waif. “I wonder,” someone now ventured, “if she is going to buy the big house over the doctor’s office. I noticed that the windows were open to-day.” “Pshaw, and her father’s house lying idle?” “Her father’s house! Good gracious, would you have the child go there?” “You make the chills run over me.” “Nobody would go into that house with her. It hasn’t been opened in fourteen years.” “The more shame,” growled the landlord. “She’ll never have anything to do with that. I’ve seen her run by it myself, as if the very shadow it cast was terrifying to her.” “Yet folks thought it was a cozy home when Ephraim took his young wife there. I remember, myself, the brass andirons in the parlor and the long row of books in the big hall upstairs. To think that those books have never been opened these fourteen years, nor the floors trod on, nor the curtains drawn back! I declare, it’s the most creepy thing of the whole affair.” “And how do you know that the floor hasn’t been walked on, nor the curtains drawn, since we took the child out from her desolate corner in the old bed-room upstairs?” suggested another voice in an odd, mysterious tone.