three years ago."

"Your old friend, Death, beat you that time," said I maliciously.

The Little Red Doctor chose to ignore my taunt. "Look your fill,
Dominie," he advised. "You won't have much more chance."

"Why?" I asked, startled.

"The wreckers begin on it next month. Also a nice, new building is going
up next door to it on that little, secret, walled jungle that Ely Crouch
used to misname his garden. I'm glad of it, too. I don't like
anachronisms."

"I'm an anachronism," I returned. "You'll be one pretty soon. Our Square
is one solid anachronism."

"It won't be much longer. The tide is undermining us. Other houses will
go as the Worth place is going. You'll miss it, Dominie. You love houses
as if they were people."

It is true. To me houses are the only fabrications of man's hands that
are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement,
but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained
against the city's relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by
habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition,
pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely
endured--the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and
joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions. Yes, I love the old
houses. Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed. It has
outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead,
unhuman thing.

That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably
with the honorable generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one
smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood
staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy
square. Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm
of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still
harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.

The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.

"Yes; you're old, Dominie. But you're not wise. You're very foolish.
Foolish and obstinate."

Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking: "Why
am I foolish and obstinate?"

"Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch. Don't
you?"

"I do."

"Then why did Ned commit suicide?"

"I don't know."

"How do you explain away his written confession?"

"I don't. I only know that it was not in Ned Worth's character willfully
to kill an old man. You were h