honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's,
some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a

retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that,
glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a

request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should
wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell

him, if he "plased," that he must ask it of somebody else.
The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the

worthy woman against what one MIGHT see, and she put it frankly to
Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she?

"craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and
the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a

gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms - so many
of them as there were too! - with her glimmering taper. Miss

Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that
she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer

Brydon meanwhile held his peace - for the moment; the question of
the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for

him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just why
a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by

his own hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the
fine old sideboard that occupied, as a "fixture," the deep recess

in the dining-room. Just now he laughed at his companions -
quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that, in the

first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting
the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to

qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to
his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice

Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a
divination, if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was

unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the
time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.

There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that
could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of

declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken
out, after a yearning look round: "But I hope you don't mean they

want you to pull THIS to pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with
his re-awakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted,

and what they were "at" him for, daily, with the iteration of
people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to

decent feelings. He had found the place, just as it stood and
beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were

values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short -
! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. "In short you're to

make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on
THOSE ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be

sentimental here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the
particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused;

an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having
so much imagination - not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one

heard most people, about the world of "society," bid for the
reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really having any. It was

agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had
answered, after a brief demur, "Well, yes; so, precisely, you may

put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained
that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other

house he would neverthelesscherish this one; and he dwelt,
further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the

stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he
felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight
of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors,

mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the
several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms

of the dead the seventy years of the past in fine that these things
represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his

grandfather's, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable
ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like

microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who
answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered

abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could
agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at

the last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And
then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live

here." It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had
been thinking, at least in her sense of the words, "You mean I may

decide to stay on for the sake of it?"
"Well, WITH such a home - !" But, quite beautifully, she had too

much tact to dot so monstrous an I, and it was precisely an
illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could any one - of

any wit - insist on any one else's "wanting" to live in New York?
"Oh," he said, "I MIGHT have lived here (since I had my opportunity

early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then
everything would have been different enough - and, I dare say,

'funny' enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of
it - I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal' -

is just in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I
had a reason about the matter at all it would HAVE to be the other

way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are
no reasons here BUT of dollars. Let us therefore have none

whatever - not the ghost of one."
They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they

stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great
square main saloon, with its almost antiquefelicity of brave

spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met
his own a moment. "Are you very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't,

much rather, serve - ?"
He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as

they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a
glare and a grin: "Oh ghosts - of course the place must swarm with

them! I should be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's
right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in."

Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't
utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for

the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element
dimly gathering. Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome

face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the
stir of an expression in the "set" commemorative plaster. Yet

whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague
platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished and lived in - !"

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he
might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But

she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words
behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and

was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while
he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the

comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of
the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller

emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped
into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it IS

lived in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for her
to sigh "Ah yes!" all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and

his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had
run their course and met their end there. That represented, within

the walls, ineffaceable life.
It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her

again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering
curiosity - among the people he met - about his appreciation of New