ke Hambleton Dillworth at his word."

And he turned the horse into the lane toward the ancient house. The
girl in my father's arms made no resistance. There was this dominating
quality in the man that one trusted to him and followed behind him. She
lay in his arms, the tears wetting her white face and the long lashes.

The moon came up, a great golden moon, shouldered over the rim of the
world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons
made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a
thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl
cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane
was deep with dust. The horse traveled with no sound, and the distorted
black shadow followed, now blotted out by the heavy tree tops, and now
only partly to be seen, but always there.

My father got down at the door and carried the girl up the steps and
between the plaster pillars into the house. There was a hall paneled
in white wood and with mahogany doors. He opened one of these doors and
went in. The room he entered had been splendid in some ancient time.
It was big; the pieces in it were exquisite; great mirrors and old
portraits were on the wall.

A man sitting behind a table got up when my father entered. Four tallow
candles, in ancient silver sticks, were on the table, and some sheets
with figured accounts.

The man who got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of
little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under
his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a
spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the
weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to
keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other men.
Then he saw who it was and the double-barreled pistol slipped out of
sight. He was startled and apprehensive, but he was not in fear.

He stood motionless behind the table, his head up, his eyes hard, his
thin mouth closed like a trap and his long, dead black hair hanging on
each side of his lank face over the huge, malformed ears. The man stood
thus, unmoving, silent, with his twisted ironical smile, while my father
put the girl into a chair and stood up behind it.

"Dillworth," said my father, "what do you mean by turning this child out
of the house?"

The man looked steadily at the two persons before him.

"Pendleton," he