"Evidently," pronounced the Major with an unconscious eye upon it, "a desirable neighborhood in every way." So the lease was signed, and Ellen Neal and the furniture sent for, and the first month's rent paid in advance; and these feats having been accomplished, Mary Darcy took to her familiar bed and died there, promptly and unobtrusively as was her way, without leaving any inconsiderate doctors' and nurses' bills behind her. That first summer in Kentucky was a strange time to Joan. It was filled with dim memories of the books she read aloud to her father day after day, in the futile effort to be a companion to him; of long walks she took with him in the cool of the evenings, through streets and parks and suburbs that were as strange to the man who had come back to them, Joan suspected, as to herself; and far more desolate. For the ghost of a boy haunted them; a mischievous, headstrong, innocent lad who had meant no harm to the world, nor to himself, in those days. Sometimes in the older streets he pointed out to her houses which came near to fulfilling her best hopes of pillared Southern mansions. "Tim Throckmorton used to live there," he would say, forlornly; or "Many's the time I've courted pretty Sally Field in that parlor!" Now there were "Furnished Room" signs in the windows, or shops in the lower floors, or, worst degeneracy of all, signs of negro habitation. For many a day the two hunted for a certain dearly remembered pond where a boy named Dick and his friends had been wont to repair for fishing and swimming and many a feat of derring-do. But they never found it; only houses already old, and even office-buildings, in the place where it might have been. And in those long and lonely walks they met no friends. It was as if for Richard Darcy the streets of Louisville were peopled by the dead. Joan had suffered for her father even more than for herself. Somehow she felt that she was better able to bear things than her father. And in her inner consciousness, lonely as she was for her mother, and must always be, she knew that the misery in her heart was a thing that would pass. She was too young to be so sad for long.