He lifted his hat courteously, and walked away with his friend, while Everard watched him for a moment with that same icy chill about his heart and the feeling as if from the darkness and silence of her far-off grave Rossie were beckoning to him and trying to warn him of danger. Meantime the two gentlemen went rapidly along the streets of Rothsay, where, as strangers, they were stared at by the people, who watched them until they turned into the avenue leading to the Forrest House. “A splendid inheritance! I quite envy you, old boy,” Walter Klyne said, as they ascended the broad steps and stood upon the piazza. “Yes, it will do very well for a country house, but it will take a mint of money to fix it up as I’d like to have it,” was the doctor’s reply, as he fitted the key to the lock and entered the wide, old-fashioned hall, already beginning to grow dim with the shadows of the late afternoon. “It’s deuced cold, and damp, and ghost-like in here; don’t you think so?” the doctor said, shivering a little as he hurried on through room after room, hardly seeing them at all, until he came to one, the door of which was open as well as the blind opposite, so that a flood of sunlight streamed through the window and fell across the floor. “This is a jolly room; let’s go in here,” Klyne said, entering himself, and looking curiously around, while the doctor stood by the threshold, wiping from his face great drops of sweat, and starting at every sound, as if he fancied the place full of something harmful. “Why, Doc, what ails you? You are white as a sheet. What’s the matter?” Klyne asked, and the doctor replied: “Nothing, only this was her room; Rossie’s, you know. I am sure of it; she described it to me so often, and I feel as if she was here with us; I do, upon my soul. That’s her chair, where she used to sit, and these must be her books, and that’s her bed where she used to sleep. Let’s go away; it’s like a graveyard to me.” He seemed so excited that his friend looked at him curiously, wondering if the glass of wine taken just before they left the hotel had affected his brain, or if it really was true that his grief for his sister was augmented by the sight of her old home, and the objects which had once made a part of her life. “It’s not like John Matthewson to love any one like that. There’s a kink somewhere,” he thought, as he left the room and followed on through one apartment after another, until the whole had been gone through, and they went out into the open air, where the doctor seemed to be more at his ease. Taking off his hat and wiping his forehead, where the perspiration was standing, he said: “This is a confounded hot night after all, or I am no judge of the weather, and this place in particular seems hotter than Tophet. I say, Walt, do you believe in ghosts, or haunted houses, or any of that sort of nonsense?” “Of course not. Why do you ask?” Walter Klyne said; and the doctor replied: