time we will have the sunset, Paula."

She smiled and they hastened on, presently finding themselves in the
village streets. Suddenly she paused. "Small towns have their mysteries
as well as great cities," said she; "we are not without ours, look."

He turned, followed with a glance the direction of her pointing finger
and started in his sudden surprise. She had indicated to him the house
whose ghostly and frowning front bore written across its grim gray
boards, such an inscription of painful remembrance. "It is a solitary
looking place, isn't it?" she went on, innocent of the pain she was
inflicting. "No one lives there or ever will, I imagine. Do you see that
board nailed across the front door?"

He forced himself to look. He did more, he fixed his eyes upon the
desolate structure before him until the aspect of its huge unpainted
walls with their long rows of sealed-up windows and high smokeless
chimneys was impressed indelibly upon his mind. The large front door
with its weird and solemn barrier was the last thing upon which his eye
rested.

"Yes," said he, and involuntarily asked what it meant.

"We do not know exactly," she responded. "It was nailed across there by
the men who followed Colonel Japha to the grave. Colonel Japha was the
owner of the house," she proceeded, too interested to observe the shadow
which the utterance of that name had invoked upon his brow. "He was a
peculiar man I judge, and had suffered great wrongs they say; at all
events his life was very solitary and sad, and on his deathbed he made
his neighbors promise him that they would carry out his body through
that door and then seal it up against any further ingress or egress
forever. His wishes were respected, and from that day to this no one has
ever entered that door."

"But the house!" stammered Mr. Sylvester in anything but his usual tone,
"surely it has not been deserted all these years!"

"Ah," said she, "now we come to the greatest mystery of all." And laying
her hand timidly on his arm, she drew his attention to the form of a
decrepit old lady just then advancing towards them down the street "Do
you see that aged figure?" she asked. "Every evening at this hour,
winter and summer, stormy weather or clear, she is seen to leave her
home up the street and come down to this forsaken dwelling, open the
worm-eaten gate before you, cross the otherwise untrodden garden and
enter the house by a side door which she opens with a huge key