“Aline, you refused the money because you guessed that I had sent it,” ran the brief note. “Oh, for God’s sake, take it, child, and believe that it is your own as the gift of a heart that bleeds because it has wronged you, and because it can make no other atonement than what lies in sordid gold. Let your father take the money and make a new home for you all in some distant city where this unmerited persecution may not follow you, and where you may have all the social pleasures due to your youth and beauty and innocence. Take the money and use it. It is only due, and I shall never forgive you if you continue to willfully refuse it. D.” She ran her eyes slowly over the brief note twice. It only excited her anger and contempt. She said to herself that he was a coward, strong man as he was, to make a weak girl suffer for the sake of that hidden secret he guarded so jealously. Oh, that she had never taken that oath of silence upon her girlish lips! How grim and gray and frowning the towers of Delaney House appeared in the dull, cold light. All the years of her girlhood it had been a pleasure to her to watch the mysterious mansion, with the picturesque ivy creeping about and covering the grim, hard angles and small-paned windows with beauty. She had watched the sunset lighting its windows with splendor every evening; she had gazed upon the beautiful garden with rapturous delight; she had speculated often, with girlish curiosity, over the motives that made Oran Delaney an alien from his kind, shut up in that gloomy house, and but seldom seen in the streets of the town. It had not always been thus. Ten years ago, before Oran Delaney went abroad, and before the Rodneys came to live in Chester, he had been friendly, genial, social, mixing freely with the best society of the town on his annual visits from college, and was liked and admired by all. After his father’s death he had shut up the old family mansion and gone abroad. He had remained away several years, and returned to his home a strange and altered man. He no longer sought society, he did not visit nor receive visits, he gave no invitations, and accepted none. He seemed to have become an inveterate recluse, and remained isolated in the lonely mansion, haunted by the ghosts of his dead-and-gone ancestors, perhaps, for there were rumors of strange sounds and blood-curdling shrieks heard by day and by night by those who passed his home. Aline had heard all these tales from the townsfolk, and her girlish interest had been strongly roused. Yet how little she had dreamed of the subtle influence Delaney House and its strange master would exert upon her life! She held the note in her fingers, and gazed dreamily at Delaney House, thinking, with a shudder, of the strange, horrible, unearthly creature hidden within its walls, and of the long days of illness and sorrow she had suffered from the creature’s rude assault.