"Very much," I assured her. "Only, I do not know a great deal about it, yet. Its history, I mean. Are there any interesting stories about the house? You know, we city people like a nice legend or ghost story to tell our friends when they come to visit us." She chuckled, swinging in her plush-covered rocking-chair, arms folded on her meagre breast. "Guess you'll have to make one up! I never heard of none. The Michell family always owned it--and they were so stiff respectable an' upright everyone was scared of 'em! Most of the men were clergymen in their time. The last, Reverend Cotton Mather Michell, went abroad to foreign parts for missionary work with the heathen, twenty-odd years ago; an' died there. He never married, so the family's run out. The Michells were awful hard on women; called 'em vessels of wrath an' beguilers of Adam. Preached it right out of the pulpit--so I guess no girl in these parts could have been hired to wed with him, if he'd wanted. His mother died when he was born, so he'd had no softenin' influence. After news came of his death, the house was shut up 'till you bought it. My, how you've changed it, already! I'd admire to go through it." When I had invited her to call on Phillida and inspect our domicile, and paid due thanks for information received, she followed me out to the car. "All this land 'round here is old and full of Indian relics," she remarked. "Over to the Sound where the swamps used to be, there was lots of fightin' with savages. An' they say a witch was stoned to death where the Catholic convent stands now, on the road up above your place. So I guess you can figure out a story to tell your company, if you like." "A convent?" I repeated, my attention caught by a new possibility. "Do they, perhaps, have visitors there, ladies in retreat for a time, as convents often do abroad?" Mrs. Hill laughed, shaking her tightly-combed head. "No hope of your girl there," she chuckled. "They're the strictest sisterhood in America, folks say. Poor Clares, I think they're called. No one, not even their relations, ever see their faces after they join. They're not allowed to talk to each other, even. Just stay in their cells, an' pray, even in the middle of the night, an' shave their heads an' live on a few vegetables an' dry bread." I laughed with her. Certainly no convent would harbor my lady of marvelous tresses and magical perfume, of wild fancies and heretical theories. That thought of mine was indeed far afield. But where, then, was I next to seek? I made a detour and used some strategy to gain a view of the Senator's daughters. They proved to be brunettes who wore their locks cropped after the fashion of certain Greenwich villagers. My disappointment was not great; my lady was not suggestive of a boarding-school miss. But I had hoped to find somewhere a trace of the copper-bronze head whose royalty of hair I had shorn as the traitors shore King Childeric's Gothic locks.