a very few minutes' walking, brought him close to the
house, towards which, and especially towards one particular window, he
directed many covert glances. It was a dreary, silent building, with
echoing courtyards, desolated turret-chambers, and whole suites of rooms
shut up and mouldering to ruin.

The terrace-garden, dark with the shade of overhanging trees, had an air
of melancholy that was quite oppressive. Great iron gates, disused for
many years, and red with rust, drooping on their hinges and overgrown
with long rank grass, seemed as though they tried to sink into the
ground, and hide their fallen state among the friendly weeds. The
fantastic monsters on the walls, green with age and damp, and covered
here and there with moss, looked grim and desolate. There was a sombre
aspect even on that part of the mansion which was inhabited and kept
in good repair, that struck the beholder with a sense of sadness; of
something forlorn and failing, whence cheerfulness was banished. It
would have been difficult to imagine a bright fire blazing in the dull
and darkened rooms, or to picture any gaiety of heart or revelry that
the frowning walls shut in. It seemed a place where such things had
been, but could be no more--the very ghost of a house, haunting the old
spot in its old outward form, and that was all.

Much of this decayed and sombre look was attributable, no doubt, to the
death of its former master, and the temper of its present occupant;
but remembering the tale connected with the mansion, it seemed the very
place for such a deed, and one that might have been its predestined
theatre years upon years ago. Viewed with reference to this legend, the
sheet of water where the steward's body had been found appeared to wear
a black and sullen character, such as no other pool might own; the bell
upon the roof that had told the tale of murder to the midnight wind,
became a very phantom whose voice would raise the listener's hair on
end; and every leafless bough that nodded to another, had its stealthy
whispering of the crime.

Joe paced up and down the path, sometimes stopping in affected
contemplation of the building or the prospect, sometimes leaning against
a tree with an assumed air of idleness and indifference, but always
keeping an eye upon the window he had singled out at first. After some
quarter of an hour's delay, a small white hand was waved to him for an
instant from this casement, and the young man, with a respe