She said she didn’t, but few believed her. The evidence against her as an accessory to the murder was sufficient to convict her, and with the three men she was sentenced to be hung. Efforts were made to commute her punishment to imprisonment for life, but public opinion was strong against her, and with her coadjutors in the crime she suffered the penalty of the law. After the execution, which was public and which hundreds attended, a half brother of Mr. Dalton came to look after the property in the interest of his nephew. In accordance with Mrs. Dalton’s request repeated to Maria, who visited her once in her cell, the latter took charge of the little boy during his childhood, and for some time lived alone with him in the house, bravely fighting her nervous dread of the room where the body had lain, and her terror on wild, rainy nights when she fancied she heard her master’s voice calling “’Tina, ’Tina” through the storm,—the sound of a scuffle near the well, and the wheels on the grass as the murderers drove away. At last, overmastered by her fear, she left the house and the town, taking the child with her and going to Canada where her friends were living. Gradually the tragedy ceased to be talked about, except when revived by stories that the house was haunted. It was rented at first, then sold by Robbie, who, after attaining his majority, came once to Ridgefield and was described as a fine looking young man, much like his father. There had been a stone placed at his father’s grave, but none at his mother’s, nor did he order one. He was there to sell his property, and he sold it and went away, while family after family occupied the house. If they did not believe in the supernatural they heard nothing. If they did believe in it they heard a great deal; a struggle by the well at midnight when the rain was falling heavily and the sky was inky black; a sound of wheels upon the grass; a choking call for ’Tina; stealthy footsteps across the floor, as if in response to that call ’Tina had gone to the window and looked out; and a child’s cry for papa and mamma, which came at any time, day or night. The mamma lay in her unmarked sunken grave and the papa under the shadow of the south wall in Ridgefield cemetery. Robert became a husband, a father and a grandfather, and he, too, died. Years passed and every actor in that tragic scene was dead, but its memory was kept alive by the house fast going to decay. For a long time it was unoccupied, and “For Sale” nailed upon the door, while the storms and the boys played havoc with it, inside and out. Then Mark Hilton, the clerk at the Prospect House, and great-grandson of Mr. Dalton, bought it for a song. He called it his ancestral hall, and said when he married he should bring his bride there and quiet ’Tina’s ghost, which still haunted it, clad in a soiled white dress, with her long curls down her back. He straightened up her grave and put a plain headstone to it with