s-by--with truth, because very near the roof were two little
windows shaped like half-circles. They somehow bore a close resemblance
to a pair of eyes that stared and stared and _stared_ with calm,
unwinking blankness.

As to the other windows and doors, they were all tightly boarded up. The
boards in the big front door had a small door fashioned in them, and
this door fastened with a very rusty lock. No one ever came in or out.
No one ever tended the grounds. The place had been without an occupant
for years. The Boarded-up House had always been boarded up, as long as
its neighbors could recollect. It was not advertised for sale. When the
little town of Rockridge began to build up, people speculated about it
for a while with considerable interest. But as they could never obtain
any definite information about it, they finally gave it up, and accepted
the queer old place as a matter of course.

To Cynthia Sprague and Joyce Kenway, it had, when they first came to
live on either side of it, some five years before, afforded for a while
an endless source of attraction. They had played house on the broad
veranda, climbed the trees in the orchard, organized elaborate games of
hide-and-seek among the thick, high bushes that grew so close to the
walls, and in idle moments had told each other long stories about its
former (imaginary) inmates. But as they grew older and more absorbed in
outside affairs, their interest in it ceased, till at length it came to
be only a source of irritation to them, since it separated their homes
by a wide space that they considered rather a nuisance to have to
traverse.

So they sat, on this threatening afternoon, cheated of their anticipated
canoe-trip on the little stream that threaded its way through their town
to the wide Sound,--sat munching sugar-cookies, glowering at the
weather, and thinking of nothing very special. Suddenly there was a
flash of gray across the lawn, closely pursued by a streak of yellow.
Both girls sprang to their feet, Joyce exclaiming indignantly:

"Look at Bates's pup chasing Goliath!" The latter individual was the
Kenways' huge Maltese cat, well deserving of his name in appearance, but
not in nature, for he was known to be the biggest coward in cat-dom. The
girls stood on tiptoe to watch the chase. Over the lawn and through an
opening in the picket-fence of the Boarded-up House sped Goliath, his
enemy yapping at his heels, and into the tangled thicket of bushes
about