It was once a farmhouse, over a century old, but two and a half years ago when Dr. Fowler bought it he fixed it all up, raised the roof, built on a servants’ wing and a piazza with columns and turned the farm buildings into a garage. Artists and such people say it’s the prettiest place in this part of the State, and it certainly is a picture, especially in summer, with the lawns mown close as velvet and the flower-beds like bits of carpet laid out to air. The Doctor bought a big bit of land with it—I don’t know how many hundred acres—so the house, though it’s not far from the village, is kind of secluded and shut away. You get to it by Maple Lane, a little winding road that runs between trees caught together with wild grape and Virginia creeper. In summer they’re like green walls all draped over with the vines and in winter they turn into a rustling gray hedge, woven so close it’s hard to see through. About ten minutes’ walk from the gate of Mapleshade there’s a pine that was struck by lightning and stands up black and bare. When the house was finished the Doctor, who was a bachelor, married Mrs. Hesketh, a widow lady accounted rich, and he and she came there as bride and groom with her daughter, Sylvia Hesketh. I hadn’t come yet, but from what I’ve heard, there was gossip about them from the start. What I can say from my own experience is that I’d hardly got my grip unpacked when I began to hear of the folks at Mapleshade. They lived in great style with a housekeeper, a butler and a French maid for the ladies. In the garage were three automobiles, Mrs. Fowler’s limousine, the Doctor’s car and a dandy little roadster that belonged to Miss Sylvia. Neither she nor the Doctor bothered much with the chauffeur. They left him to take Mrs. Fowler round and drove themselves, the joke going that if Miss Sylvia ever went broke she could qualify for a chauffeur’s job. After a while the story came out that it wasn’t Mrs. Fowler who was so rich but Miss Hesketh. The late Mr. Hesketh had only left his wife a small fortune, willing the rest—millions, it was said—to his daughter. She was a minor—nineteen—and the trustees of the estate allowed her a lot of money for her maintenance, thirty thousand a year they had it in Longwood.