As for the gentleman himself he neither knew nor cared what the good villagers thought of him. He was among them, but not of them. He sought no society and received no guests. He dwelt alone and lonely in the grand old mansion where several generations of his ancestors had lived and died, and which popular imagination peopled with ghosts. Indeed, it was positively asserted that at the dread midnight hour shrieks of woe had been heard to issue from the deserted house, and lights had been seen flashing from window to window as if waved in phantom hands. The Delaneys had been a hard, proud, cruel race, so said Mme. Rumor, that knowing dame, and it was no wonder if some of them returned to earth in spirit to bewail the deeds done in the flesh. The humbler home of the Rodneys, a simple two-storied cottage, stood next the gloomy gray stone mansion, and the small end window of Aline’s little room overlooked the beautiful garden where the taciturn, grave-browed master strolled at will, and smoked his choice Havanas and switched off the heads of his splendid roses and lilies with his slender ebony cane as if hating all things beautiful and sweet. Many a time and oft Aline had watched this strange, mysterious unknown neighbor of theirs through a crevice in the white curtain, and speculated curiously over his history, while she inwardly deprecated the fact that those splendid flowers belonged to such a monster. “The cruel wretch! To snap off their heads with his ugly stick! I should like to knock _his_ head off!” Aline often muttered indignantly to herself, and lo! now in her eagerness to place the obnoxious book forever beyond her mother’s reach, she had almost compassed her wish. She saw the tall, straight figure reel a moment under the suddenness of the blow, saw him put his white hand quickly to his head, where a sharp corner of the book had inadvertently struck it. In her terror and dismay she uttered a little cry of alarm and regret. He looked up quickly at the sound--so quickly that she could not retreat. As he looked up he saw the sweetest girl face he had ever beheld in his life--beautiful even through its frightened pallor--with startled, wide-open blue eyes, the long black lashes curled upward, giving them an expression of almost infantine innocence and purity. The delicate oval of the lovely face was daintily broken by a deep dimple in the rounded chin, the parted red lips disclosed teeth like pearls, and the dark, silken hair, worn in short, babyish rings on the round, white forehead, fell over her shoulders in long, loose, natural ringlets to the slender, rounded waist. Framed in the small, white-draped window, with a vine of his own rare clematis clambering up from his garden and twining luxuriantly about the casement, she looked like some beautiful picture--a picture that Oran Delaney carried in his heart to his dying day, “unforgotten in every charm.”