“And he carried all that away with him and never left a dollar to his little motherless child? Oh, I know that some people say he was foully dealt with and that it was not of his own free will that he left me to the mercies of the town. But I never believed that. I have always thought of him as alive, and many is the night I have waked up crying—Oh, I can cry at night and in the darkness, if I do laugh all day when the sun shines—because I dreamt he was enjoying himself in foreign lands while I—” she stopped, looking inquiringly at Dr. Izard, and he, startled, looked inquiringly at her, then for the second time he rose up, and taking the light, went out to search up and down the ghostly waste before him, for what he rather felt than knew was near. “Oh, how late it is getting!” cried the little maiden, peering over his shoulder. “Did you think you heard someone sigh? I thought I did, but who would come creeping up to this spot? Do you know,” she exclaimed, drawing him in just as he was about to turn his attention to the side of the house against which they stood, “that I believe it’s that horrid green door which gives people the shivers when they come here. Why is it there and what is on the other side of it that you bar it up like that?” The doctor, lifting his abstracted gaze, stared at the door for a moment, then turned moodily away. “It was the old way of going upstairs,” he remarked. “Why shouldn’t I bar it, since I have no further use for the rest of the house?” “But its color,” she persisted; “why do you not paint it white?” “When I fit up my den for a bride, then I will,” he retorted, and the audacious little thing became dumb on this subject, though she showed no inclination for dropping the other. “Dear Dr. Izard,” she pursued, “I know I ought to be going home, but I have something more to ask, and it isn’t always that you allow me to speak to you. Our house—you know what I mean, my father’s and mother’s house,—is it really haunted, and is that why it is shut up, even from me?” “Do you want to go into it, Polly?” “No—and yet I have sometimes thought I should like to. It must be full of relics of my parents, and if it has not been disturbed since my father went away, why, I might almost see the prints of his feet on the floors, and the pressure of his form in the old lounges and chairs.” “You are too imaginative!” cried the doctor. “They will have to marry you to some practical man.” She flushed, drew back and seemed on the point of uttering some violent protest or indignant reproach, but instead of that she returned to the original topic. “I should like to hear from your lips, which never exaggerate or add the least bit of romance to anything you say, just the story of my father’s departure and that sudden shutting up of the house. I think I ought to know now that I am a grown woman and have money of my own.”