"Jocko knows how I dare!" said Will Jaquith. "Dear old friend, I will tell you what it means. It means that I have brought you another Golden Lily in place of the one you said I spoiled. You can only have her to look at, though, for she is mine, mine and my mother's, and we cannot give her up, even to you." "I didn't exactly break my promise, Lily!" cried the old lady; her hands trembled on her stick, but her cap was erect, immovable. "I didn't tell him, but I never promised not to tell James Stedman, you know I never did." The lovely, dark-eyed girl bent over her and kissed the withered cheek again. "My dear! my naughty, wicked, delightful dear," she murmured, "how shall I ever forgive you--or thank you?" CHAPTER XIII. LIFE IN DEATH "Drive to Miss Dane's!" said Mrs. Tree. "Drive where?" asked old Anthony, pausing with one foot on the step of the ancient carryall. "To Miss Dane's!" "Well, I snum!" said old Anthony. The Dane Mansion, as it was called, stood on the outskirts of the village; a gaunt, gray house, standing well back from the road, with dark hedges of Norway spruce drawn about it like a funeral scarf. The panelled wooden shutters of the front windows were never opened, and a stranger passing by would have thought the house uninhabited; but all Elmerton knew that behind those darkling hedges and close shutters, somewhere in the depths of the tall many-chimneyed house, lived--"if you can call it living!" Mrs. Tree said--Miss Virginia Dane. Miss Dane was a contemporary of Mrs. Tree's,--indeed, report would have her some years older,--but she had no other point of resemblance to that lively potentate. She never left her house. None of the present generation of Elmertonians had ever seen her face; and to the rising generation, the boys and girls who passed the outer hedge, if dusk were coming on, with hurried step and quick affrighted glances, she was a kind of spectre, a living phantom of the past, probably terrible to look upon, certainly dreadful to think of. These terrors were heightened by the knowledge, diffused one hardly knew how, that Miss Dane was a spiritualist, and that in her belief at least, the silent house was peopled with departed Danes, the brothers and sisters of whom she was the last remaining one. Things being thus, it was perhaps not strange that old Anthony, usually the most discreet of choremen, was driven by surprise to the extent of "snumming" by the order he received. He allowed himself no further comment, however, but flecked the fat brown horse on the ear with his whip, and said "Gitty up!" with more interest than he usually manifested. Mrs. Tree was arrayed in her India shawl, and crowned with the bird-of-paradise bonnet, from which swept an ample veil of black lace. She sat bolt upright in the carriage, her stick firmly planted in front of her, her hands crossed on its crutch handle, and her whole air was one of uncompromising energy.