Floy was heiress by her birth to a small estate and to a terrible taint of blood--the mania for suicide. She was a descendant of the Nellest family, that for forty years had numbered in each decade a suicide among its members. The scene of these tragedies was at an old farm-house on a lonely road two miles from Mount Vernon. The house, a substantial and somewhat pretentious structure of rough dark stone, overgrown picturesquely in many places with creeping ivy, stood back from the road in a magnificent grove of old oak-trees, and twenty-five acres of rich farming land stretched away in the rear. But so grewsome was the reputation of the place, that for nine years it had had no tenants, and its name had changed, by tacit consent of the neighborhood, from Nellest Farm to Suicide Place. The Nellest family had owned and tilled this farm almost a hundred years, but in the middle of the century the head of the family had committed suicide by cutting his throat, and just ten years later, his only son was found hanging from a tree near the spot where his father died. The widow of the son, with her only daughter, continued to reside at the farm, employing a competent man to manage it. But when another decade rolled around, the neighborhood was horrified to learn that the manager had shot himself in the head, adding the third to the list of deaths by suicidal mania. Horrified and unnerved by all these tragedies, Widow Nellest fled from the place with her beautiful young daughter, leaving the property in the hands of a lawyer for rent or sale. But neither buyer nor tenant could be found, and successive crops of weeds ripened and died on the untilled acres. The poorest beggar would have refused to live there rent-free. At almost the end of the next decade the daughter of Widow Nellest returned to the place in widow’s weeds, and with a child seven years old. Her mother had died of a broken heart, she said, and she herself had been married and widowed. In spite of the horror of the neighborhood, she took up her abode at Suicide Place, declaring herself poor and unable to make a home elsewhere. Here she lived alone with her child, as neither man-servant nor maid-servant would have gone inside the gates for love or money. And here, after a few months’ solitude, Mrs. Fane, overcome by the terrible, mysterious spirit of the old place, succumbed to the mania of her family and poisoned herself. John Banks, who had been employed by the woman to mend her gates, heard the frightened shrieks of little Floy one morning when he came to his work, and most reluctantly entered the house. He found Mrs. Fane dead, with a bottle of poison clutched in her stiffened hand. She had been dead for hours. The carpenter took the orphan child to his own home, and into his big, generous heart. Then he reported the case, after which there was a coroner’s inquest and a verdict of suicide by poison.