foreboding put his
courage to flight.

"Confound it all," muttered he, as he wandered aimlessly from one
deserted room to another: "the very house seems under a spell. Sybil,
sitting like a recluse in her own rooms, growing pale, and wild-eyed,
and spectre-like, every day. Evan, in _his_ room, sick with drink, and
verging on the D. T. Mother, gliding like a stately ghost from the one
to the other, or closeted in her own room; she has not been down stairs
to-day. Burrill, the devil knows where _he_ is, and what took him out so
unusually early this morning. He's been cutting it worse than ever for
the past week; the fellow, seemingly, can't find company low enough for
him, in one stage of his drunkenness, nor high enough for him in
another. It's fortunate for us that liquor has at last relaxed his
vigilance; the old man has taken a leading trick by the means. Curse the
brute! Why won't he die in a drunken frenzy, or from overfeeding, but he
won't!" Thus soliloquizing, he lighted a segar and went out into the
grounds. "I'll try the effect of a little sunshine," he muttered; "for
the house feels like a sarcophagus; one would think the family pride was
about to receive its last blow, and the family doom about to fall."

So, restless and self-tormented, Frank Lamotte passed the long
afternoon, in the double solitude of a man deserted, alike by his
friends and his peace of mind.

"We make our own ghosts," said somebody once.

Frank Lamotte's phantoms had begun to manifest themselves, having grown
into things of strength, and become endowed with the power to torture;
thanks to the atmosphere into which he had plunged himself and them.

Late in the afternoon, John Burrill came home, but Frank avoided him,
not caring to answer any questions at that time.

Burrill seemed to care little for this, or for anything; he was in a
wonderfully jubilant mood. He rambled through the tenantless rooms,
whistling shrilly, and with his hands in his pockets. He commanded the
servants like a Baron of old. He drank wine in the library, and smoked a
segar in the drawing room, and when these pleasures palled upon him, he
ascended the stairs, and went straight to the room occupied by Evan.

For some time past, Jasper Lamotte had made an effort to break the bond
of good fellowship, that, much to the surprise of all the family, had
sprung up between the wild young fellow, and the coarser and equally or
worse besotted elder one. How even reckles