“Naw, sir,” the man answered at random, but loweringly. He bent his head while he swiftly threaded his way through the group as if he were accustomed to force his progress with horns. He was in evident haste; he stepped deftly down the flight to the pavement and, turning aside on the weed-grown turf, reached the shrubbery and was lost to view among the dripping evergreen foliage. As it is the accepted fad to admire old houses rather than the new, a gentleman of the party who made a point of being up-to-date began to comment on the spacious proportions of the hall, and the really stately curves of the staircase as it came sweeping down from a lofty _entresol_. “It looks as if it might be a spiral above the second story, isn’t that an unusual feature, or is it merely the attic flight?” he interrogated space. For Floyd-Rosney, all the host, was looking into the adjoining rooms and giving orders for the lighting of fires wherever a chimney seemed practicable. “Listen how the old rattle-trap is leaking,” said one of the elderly ladies, ungratefully. Paula made no comment. She was hearing the melancholy drip, drip, drip of the rain through the ceilings of the upper stories. As the drops multiplied in number and increased in volume they sounded to her like foot-falls, now rapid, now slow, circumspect and weighty; sometimes there was a frenzied rush as in a wild catastrophe, and again a light tripping in a sort of elastic tempo, as of the vibrations of some gay dance of olde. The echoes,--oh, the echoes,--she dropped her face in her hands for a moment, lest she should see the echoes materialized, that were coming down the stairs, evoked from the silence, the solitude, the oblivion of the ruined mansion. Neglected here so long, who would have recked if the old memories had taken wonted form--who would have seen, save the moonbeam, itself wan and vagrant, or the wind of kindred elusiveness, going and coming as it listed. Yet there had been other and more substantial tenants. “The damned rascals have pulled up nearly every hearth in the house,” Floyd-Rosney was saying, as he came forging back through the rooms on the right. Then once more among the ladies he moderated his diction. “Destroying the hearths, searching for the hidden treasure of Duciehurst--idiotic folly! River pirates, shanty-boaters, tramps, gipsies, and such like vagrants, I suppose.” Paula, seated on one of the steps of the stair, cast a furtive glance at Adrian Ducie, who had followed Floyd-Rosney from the inner apartments. His face was grave, absorbed, pondering. Doubtless he was thinking of the persistence of this tradition to endure, unaided, unfostered for forty years. It must have had certainly some foundation in fact. “Perhaps the vagrants discovered it and carried it off,” suggested the up-to-date man.