“But the plate! I have heard of gold plate, silver plate, copper plate, brass plate, and electro plate, but with none of these could I associate this mongrel species, these odds and ends we were called upon to use. It was, indeed, an enigma, and I hate enigmas, especially when they are not worth the trouble of solving. Luckily, substitutes were easily obtainable. I wired for a complete supply of plate from home, after which the motley crew of hirelings were no longer in evidence. “And the carpets! I have always thought such luxuries, even the most costly, a doubtful blessing; these were undoubtedly an unmixed evil. Fortunately, we were able to dispense with them. The floors underneath were of polished oak, and with these we were greatly taken. True, we were somewhat puzzled to account for certain irregularities in the boards, but, on the whole, I think we should have been more astonished had we found them intact. “Could we, by any means, make the place tenantable? Marie and Eugenie are brave and forgiving girls! In spite of their recent adventure--they had never been so insulted in their lives--they thought it possible; mother and I were doubtful. “We hired all the furniture there was to be hired from the village, we engaged by the day the only prepossessing and respectable woman it contained, and we tried to settle down and pretend we enjoyed it. From the beginning it was a fiasco--we were miserable! and to add to our distress, or rather, to fill to overflowing our cup of misfortune, the weather became miserable, too; it began to rain. “What was there to hope for now? Nothing! What was there to do now? Nothing! Nothing but sit at the window and gaze at the dreary lawn, shut off from the road by a hideous wall, or to flit about from room to room wringing one’s hands like a distracted phantom. “A phantom! I did not believe in phantoms when I came to Thurlow; I treated the Unknown with the blind levity of a Voltaire; I was inconsequently sceptical; I had been born psychic. “Though I was sublimely unconscious of it, the dawn of my awakening was at hand. “Though the house was undesirable in so many ways--cold, bare, comfortless, dilapidated--it was not without interest. It was old--old with the antiquity of two or more centuries--and age is always interesting. “There were rooms in it, narrow, rectangular rooms darkened by Virginian creeper that dropped their crimson foliage over diamond panes, rooms the very air of which seemed charged with the shades of old-world wits and _savants_. “In my imagination the house had once been a school: the severity of the walls, the coldness of their neat yellow stones suggested it; I even went so far as to fancy I could discern ink-stains on the skirting-boards; and who but schoolboys ever desecrate a floor with ink-stains? “The predominating feature in the house was undoubtedly the staircase.