With Miss Pengarvon the love of hoarding had grown in intensity year by year, till it had become the ruling passion of her life. Now as always, her food was served up ceremoniously on some relics of the family plate, but it consisted only of the plainest and least expensive viands. With the passage of each year, the old house was becoming more ruinous and dilapidated; nothing in the way of repairs had been done to it since Sir Jasper's death. The whole of the rooms, with the exception of the three or four occupied by the sisters, and the kitchen and domestic offices, were locked and shuttered and left to dust, mildew, and decay. What remained of the park was rented by a farmer as pasturage for his cattle. In one corner of the garden Barney cultivated a few vegetables, just enough for home consumption, but further than that no hand ever touched the grounds or shrubberies, which, in the course of years, had degenerated into a veritable wilderness, not lacking in a certain wild, luxuriant beauty of their own during the spring and summer months, but unspeakably dreary when the leaves lay rotting and sodden on sad-eyed, still November afternoons, or when the chill December rains fell with dull, hopeless persistency, as over the deathbed of the passing year. Early in January, Mrs. Dale died after a few hours' illness, and Barney had to send for one of his nieces, Lucy Grice by name, to fill her place. But the girl, after having been at Broome for a week, declared that she would sleep there no longer. The place was haunted, she averred. She had no objection to go there in the daytime and do what work might be required of her, but stay there after nightfall she would not. Miss Pengarvon listened with a contemptuous stare while Barney explained the state of the case to her. "The girl is a fool," she said curtly. "Of course the house is haunted, just as every house which has been inhabited by people who are dead, is haunted--no more and no less. You and she can arrange the matter between you as you think best." Accordingly, the girl was allowed to go backward and forward, morning and evening, between her mother's cottage at Dritton and Broome. A few weeks after the foregoing little episode had taken place, a stranger arrived one evening at the "King's Arms" Hotel, Stavering, where he ordered supper and a bed. He was a handsome, well-preserved man of sixty-five or thereabouts, and of semi-military appearance. Next morning, after breakfast, he expressed a wish to see the landlord, and was accordingly at once waited upon by that functionary, a man about the same age as the stranger. "Pray, sit down," said the latter, indicating a chair; "that is, if you can spare me ten minutes of your company." "Ten minutes! An hour, sir, if you wish it. Since the coaches were knocked off the road there ain't----But I needn't trouble you on that score, sir." "May I ask whether you have lived in Stavering for any considerable number of years?"