s his delusions had gained upon him, and under
their influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an
extravagance. He was growing more and more solitary in his habits, more
and more negligent of his appearance. He was up late at night, wandering
about the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his light being
seen flitting from window to window, the story got about that the old
house was haunted.

One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the
house. Her uncle had been gone since the day before. The two women were
both away at the village. At such times the child took a strange delight
in exploring all the hiding-places of the old mansion. She had the
mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the dead and the living all to
herself. What a fearful kind of pleasure in its silence and loneliness!
The old clock that Marmaduke Storr made in London more than a hundred
years ago was clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century. The
featured moon on its dial had lifted one eye, as if to watch the child,
as it had watched so many generations of children, while the
swinging pendulum ticked them along into youth, maturity, gray hairs,
deathbeds,--ticking through the prayer at the funeral, ticking without
grief through all the still or noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without
joy when the smiles and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.
She looked at herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.
She pulled aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads
of the house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it,
and the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the
chisel.

She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
punishment. A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
higher than a man's head. Something was hanging from it,--an old
garment, was it? She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand. She
did what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
downstairs with all her might. She rushed out of the door and called to
the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place. What could be
done was done, but it was too late.

Uncle Malachi had made away with himself. That was plain on the face
of thing. In due time the coroner's verdict settled it. It was not so
strange as it seemed; but it made a