But no sound broke the stillness, save the torturing gnawing of a miserable mouse in the wainscot, and Thea’s mind wandered a minute from her own poor attempt at poetry to the glorious laureate: “All day within the dreary house The doors upon their hinges creaked; The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse Behind the moldering wainscot shrieked, Or from the crevice peered about. Old faces glimmered through the doors, Old footsteps trod the upper floors, Old voices called her from without, She only said: ‘My life is dreary,’ ‘He cometh not,’ she said.” Thea lifted her head, shook the golden curls back from her face, and sighed. “I wish those terribly real lines had not come to my mind just now. ‘Old faces!’ What if they were to glimmer through that door now? That dying woman, Nance, she used to be here. What if her departing spirit chose to haunt the scene of its former life by ghostly rappings such as I have heard the old Virginia darkies whisper about in twilight hours? Ugh!” shuddering, “that dead woman, too--Norman’s first wife, who hated me so bitterly in my childhood--I hope her phantom footsteps will never tread these ‘upper floors.’ I am afraid of ‘old voices’ and ‘old footsteps’ to-night. I never was so nervous in all my life before. I can’t finish my verses with those cold chills running down my spine and my curls rising on end with terror that has no reason for it.” She thrust the scribbled lines carelessly into a drawer of the table, and running to the crib, laid her pale, cold cheek down by the warm, rosy baby one, shutting her eyes and whimpering, distressfully: “Alan, Alan, wake, dear, and protect your poor silly little mamma. I am frightened, but I do not know why. Surely there is nothing near to harm me, and nurse must surely be coming in a minute--Ah!” with sudden gladness, “I hear her now.” CHAPTER LVI. It was quite true that a footstep had paused outside the nursery-door. Thea’s quick ear had detected it, and she waited eagerly for the entrance of the nurse, as she supposed it to be, but a hand turned the knob, and as the door swung lightly ajar two women crossed the threshold and advanced into the room. Thea turned her face listlessly a moment on the pillow and stared at the intruders, then sprung to her feet with a startled cry. The nurse had not returned. Two strange white faces were there instead of Mary’s familiar black one. Their eyes swept Thea’s face and the room with a sort of insolent contempt. A thrill of indescribable terror went through the girl’s supple frame, and just then the foremost woman spoke. She pointed a slender gloved hand at the crib, and asked, sharply, angrily: “Whose child is that?” “It is mine,” Thea answered, with such pride in her tone and cresting her golden head with so queenly an air that the woman lifted her hand with a gesture of threatening, as if to strike her down at her feet.