How brightly the sun shone on the dazzling crust of snow, how pure was the keen, cold air, how joyously the sleigh-bells rang! Italy’s spirits began to rise a little from the leaden weight that had pressed them down all day. They were miles out into the country now; the houses were few and far between, the open fields, the tree-branches, the roofs, the fences all lay white and dazzling under that royal mantle of spotless, new-fallen snow. “Look, there is Mr. Seabright’s house! How beautiful the place is under all that snow!” suddenly cried out Alexie. Italy turned her head, and then she received a shock that she never forgot to her dying day. The red brick house setting back among the thick evergreen shrubberies, now bending down under the weight of the snow, was the same house to which Craig Severn had carried her that never-to-be-forgotten night when he was murdered--the house from which she had escaped, she knew not how, to be found at midnight wandering the streets of Boston in her night-robe. With these rushing thoughts came the memory of the portrait of Percy Seabright that she had seen on the wall. “It is _his_ house. Why did I never suspect it before?” she wondered; then she heard Emmett Harlow saying, in a voice of disgust: “That old house ought to be razed to the ground. Percy Seabright has made it a sort of club-house for a fast lot of men, and the most reckless gambling goes on inside its walls. There are dark hints of several suicides committed there by men stripped of everything in reckless play.” “Oh, I don’t think it can be as bad as that!” cried generous Alexie. “Mr. Seabright keeps up the house all the time, though, he says, and gives card-parties now and then to his young friends; but Aunt Ione detests the place as much as you do, Emmett, and she says as soon as she is back from her wedding-tour she means to have it torn down.” “It strikes me that Mrs. Dunn is preparing to rule her husband with a heavy hand. I hope you are not inoculated with her propensity to rule or ruin,” Ralph cried, a little testily, and the girl laughed good-naturedly. She was as sweet and gentle a soul as ever lived, and would always yield to Love’s gentle guidance. They had left the red-brick house in the distance now, and perhaps no one thought of it again but Italy--Italy who had such cause to remember it. “I wish,” she said to herself, “I wish I could get into that old house and search--for my father’s missing diary that my mother believes holds the clue to my father’s fate. Perhaps--perhaps--Percy Seabright has it! My mother’s revelations to-day have roused in me suspicions that can never be dispelled until I know the truth. Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?” Alexie’s voice broke in suddenly on the girl’s troubled thoughts: