She came from the same place whence he came--a small Virginia town somewhere near the coast. As the current reports ran, the Foxmaster plantation and the plantation of her family adjoined; as children--remember, I am still quoting the account that was generally accepted--they had played together; as young man and young woman they had been sweethearts. He wronged her and then denied her marriage. Her father was dead; she had no brothers and no near male relatives to exact, at the smaller end of a pistol, satisfaction from the seducer. So she dedicated her days and nights to the task of haunting him with the constant reminder of his crime and her wrongs. She clad herself in black, with a veil before her face to hide it, as one in mourning for a dead life; and she set herself to following him wherever he might go. She never spoke to him; she never, so far as the world at large knew, wrote to him nor meddled in any fashion whatsoever with him or his affairs--but she followed him. The war, coming on, broke for four years the continuity of her implacable plan of vengeance. When the war was over, and he came back home, she took it up again. He left the town where he had been reared and moved to Richmond, and then after a time from Richmond to Baltimore; in due season she followed after. Finally he had moved to this more westerly city, lying on the border between the North and the South. And now here she was too. Through an agent in Virginia she had leased, ready furnished, the old Gresham place, diagonally across the way from the front entrance of the Gaunt House; that fact speedily came out, proving that, like him, she also had means of her own. Through this same agent the taxes were thereafter paid. Presumably she moved in under cover of night, for she was a figure that, once seen, was not to be forgotten; and most certainly no one could remember having seen her before that fine spring morning when Major Foxmaster came out of the Gaunt House to find her waiting for him. She had brought her servants with her--a middle-aged mulatto man and his wife, a tall, young, coal-black negro woman; both of them as close-mouthed as only some negroes can be, when they are the exceptions to prove the rule of a garrulous race. The mulatto man was a combination of butler and gardener. It was he who did the marketing, dealing with the tradespeople and paying all the bills. The negro woman was the cook, presumably. Passers-by rarely saw her. These two, with their mistress, composed the household.