"Oh, yes," she artlessly answered in reply to the concluding query; "I'll want to go back there lots o' times; but not to see them! I'll--only--go--back --there--to--see"--and here she was holding up the little flared-out fingers of her left hand, and with the index finger of the right touching their pink tips in ordered notation with the accent of every gleeful word--"I'll--only--go--back--there --to--see--David--Mason--Jeffries--'cause--he's --the--boy--fer--me!" And then she clapped her hands again and laughed in that half-hysterical, half- musical way of hers till we all joined in and made the echoes of the old hall ring again. "And then," she went on, suddenly throwing out an imperative gesture of silence--"and then, after I've been in this-- here house a long, long time, and you all gits so's you like me awful--awful--awful well, then some day you'll go in that room there--and that room there--and in the kitchen--and out on the porch-- and down the cellar--and out in the smoke-house-- and the wood-house--and the loft--and all around --oh, ever' place--and in here--and up the stairs-- and all them rooms up there--and you'll look behind all the doors--and in all the cubboards--and under all the beds--and then you'll look sorry-like, and holler out, kind o' skeert, and you'll say: 'Where-- is--Mary--Alice--Smith?' And then you'll wait and listen and hold yer breath; and then somepin' 'll holler back, away fur off, and say: 'Oh--she--has gone--home!' And then ever'thing'll be all still ag'in, and you'll be afraid to holler any more--and you dursn't play--and you can't laugh, and yer throat'll thist hurt and hurt, like you been a-eatin' too much calamus-root er somepin'!" And as the little gipsy concluded her weird prophecy, with a final flourish of her big pale eyes, we glanced furtively at one another's awestruck faces, with a superstitious dread of a vague indefinite disaster most certainly awaiting us around some shadowy corner of the future. Through all this speech she had been slowly and silently groping up the winding steps, her voice growing fainter and fainter, and the littly pixy form fading, and wholly vanishing at last around the spiral banister of the upper landing. Then down to us from that alien recess came the voice alone, touched with a tone as of wild entreaty and despair: "Where--is--Mary-- Alice--Smith?" And then a long breathless pause, in which our wide-eyed group below huddled still closer, pale and mute. Then--far off and faint and quavering with a tenderness of pathos that dews the eyes of memory even now--came, like a belated echo, the voice all desolate: "Oh--she--has --gone--home!"