For such a mistress and such a household the old Gresham place made a most fit abiding place. It was one of those houses that seemed builded for the breeding of mysteries and the harbouring of tragedies--the kind of house that cannot stand vacant long without vaguely acquiring the reputation of being haunted. It was a big, foursquare house of greyish stone, placed in the exact centre of a narrow, treeless lot, which extended through for the full depth of the city block. In front of it was a high picketed fence and a deep, bare grassplot; behind it was a garden of sorts, with a few stunted and illy-nourished berry bushes; and on each side of it was a brick wall, so high that the sunshine never fell on the earth at the side of the house toward the north; and even in the hottest summer weather the foundation stones there were slick and sweaty with the damp, and big snails crawled on the brick wall that ran in the shadow of the wall, leaving trails of a luminous slime across the slick greenish mould which covered the bricks. The woman took this house, with its gear and garnishings, just as the last of the Greshams had left it when he died. During the months and years it remained tenantless all the upper windows had been tightly shuttered; she left them so. In the two lower front windows, which flanked the deeply recessed front door and which lacked blinds, were stiff, heavy shades of a dull silver colour, drawn down until only a glassed space of inches showed between their unfringed ends and the stone copings. These, too, were left as they had been. They accorded well with the blank, cold house itself; they matched in with its drear old face; they made you think of coins on a dead man's eyes. This house, as I have said, stood almost opposite the Gaunt House. What went on within it no outsider ever knew, for no outsider ever crossed its threshold--to this good day no outsider ever has known; but every day its door opened to let out its draped and veiled mistress, setting forth on her business, which was to follow Major Foxmaster; and every night, when that day's business was done, it opened again to let her back in. In time the town grew used to the sight; it never grew tired of talking about it.