Elizabeth Houghton sat on a big stone beside the road, just where the highway forked, her school books still tucked under her arm. Her round blue eyes stared straight before her, as she tried, with one last effort, to make up her mind. For a whole week she had been attempting to reach a decision: that very morning she had told herself sternly that the matter must be settled to-day, yet still she had kept on debating inwardly, hour after hour, saying, one moment, “I will,” and the next, “I won’t.” In the late afternoon she had set out for Aunt Susan’s to announce her decision, but here she was pausing at the turn of the way, still irresolute. If she went onward by the broad highroad that stretched before her, she would come to the big country-house where her aunt lived and where, once inside the door, all her doubts and hesitations would be swept away by Aunt Susan’s forcible arguments. On the other hand, if she climbed the hill up the narrower branch of the way, Somerset Lane, she would come, she knew, to the white cottage beside the road where lived Miss Miranda Reynolds, a friend of her father’s whom she had been bidden to go to see. When she set forth after school she had purposed vaguely going to one place or the other. If to Miss Reynolds’, it would be putting off the moment of her decision a little longer, if to Aunt Susan’s, it would end in settling the matter once for all. She turned about on the stone and looked up the crooked path of Somerset Lane, winding steeply up the slope above her and ending before a great stone entrance-way with barred iron gates. Beyond the gates she could catch further glimpses of rising ground, groups of trees and, at the very summit of the hill, the broken walls of a ruined building. It must have been a fire, she concluded, after staring upward for some minutes, that had so blackened the stone walls and left them standing, empty and desolate, with here and there a blank window or the part of an arched doorway. For very weariness with pondering her own problem, she began to let her mind wander away in vague curiosity as to how such destruction had come about and how the fire had looked as it had swept blazing across the long roofs until they crashed and fell, had glowed behind the empty windows and had gone up in columns of sparks and flame above the dark trees. Her father had told her nothing of this big ruined house at the top of the hill, he had merely directed her to look for the Reynolds cottage half way up the slope among the maple trees. No doubt, Elizabeth thought, Miss Reynolds could give her an account of the fire. This idea gave some point to a visit in which she had felt very little interest until now. She had a twinge of conscience as she sat looking up the lane remembering how long it was since she had promised her father to go, and how she should have climbed that steep way many days before.