his whining, the
channels that tears had worn under his faithful eyes. She would have
liked to take him up in her arms and comfort him; but once when her
pity moved her to attempt it, the dog ran at her ravening. The husband
cried out: 'Has he hurt you, my Love?' and was for stringing him up.
But some compunction stirred in her, and she saved him from the rope,
though she made no more attempts to conciliate him.

After that the dog disappeared from the warm living-rooms, where he
had been used to stretch on the rug before the leaping wood-fires. It
was a cold and stormy autumn, with many shipwrecks, and mourning in
the village for drowned husbands and sons, whose little fishing boats
had been sucked into the boiling surges. The roar of the wind and the
roar of the waves made a perpetual tumult in the air, and the creaking
and lashing of the forest trees aided the wild confusion. There were
nights when the crested battalions of the waves stormed the hill-sides
and foamed over the Abbey graves, and weltered about the hearthstones
of the high-perched fishing village. When there was not storm there
was bitter black frost.

The old house had attics in the gables, seldom visited. You went up
from the inhabited portions by a corkscrew staircase, steep as a
ladder. The servants did not like the attics. There were creaking
footsteps on the floors at night, and sometimes the slamming of a door
or the stealthy opening of a window. They complained that locked doors
up there flew open, and bolted windows were found unbolted. In storm
the wind keened like a banshee, and one bright snowy morning a
housemaid, who had business there, found a slender wet footprint on
the floor as of some one who had come barefoot through the snow;--and
fled down shrieking.

In one of the attics stood a great hasped chest, wherein the dead
woman's dresses were mouldering. The chest was locked, and was likely
to remain so for long, for the new mistress had flung away the key.
From the high attic windows there was a glorious view of sea and land,
of the red sandstone valleys where the deer were feeding, of the black
tossing woods, of the roan bulls grazing quietly in the park, and far
beyond, of the sea, and the fishing fleet, and in the distance the
smoke of a passing steamer. But none observed that view. There was not
a servant in the house who would lean from the casement without
expecting the touch of a clay-cold finger on her shoulder. Any whose
b