t making the slightest recognition of their presence.
Stopping full in front of them, he took off his hat, applied a
straggling red handkerchief uncertainly to his face, and stared
up at the house-front.

"They tell me," he muttered, not once looking at either of his
interlocutors, "that yer've been and sold it. So yer couldn't stand
it, eh, after all? It's what Al Makepeace said 'u'd be the case. Looks
innocent, though, as herself did, now, don't it?"

"We've sold it," Julia protested, "only because--because we can't stay
here. Jack--Mr. Hastings--and I are going to be married. We are going
to live in Europe. My father and mother didn't want--"

"Yer can't make a new dog out of an old dog, ner learn an old dog new
tricks," he went on disregardingly; "and I guess it's the same fur's
houses be concerned."

"Who are you, anyway?" Hastings asked, getting up to offer the old man a
chair.

"Who am I?" the old man echoed, suddenly attentive. "Dear me, dear me!
Whose father was it as planted--and I had his own word fer it--all these
'ere tam'rack trees, and dug the well by the south door? And seen the
lady of the house herself, mind yer, go out 'tween them stone posts fer
the last time--and darker than pitch it was, too--on her way that night
she went to meet Henry--"

At this point the old man was seized by a fit of coughing. When he
recovered from it, he just stood there, gazing ahead of him, shaken with
the palsy of years, so that he failed to heed the questions they thrice
repeated to him.

"No wonder yer couldn't sleep in it, with her curse on the big empty
halls! When the crops themselves died the night afterward, without a
sign of a frost comin' down to touch them! It was the devil's own
guilt in her that did it, Al says. Poor man! poor man! And yer tried
ter dress it all up like a corpse, as if yer thought it was dead; but
it came to life on yer, did it?" he mumbled, laughing incomprehensibly
to himself. "When yer leavin'? To-morrer? Sooner the better fer yer, I
guess. Good-day." With which imprecation the old man turned, feebly put
on his hat, and dragged himself back down the avenue whence he had come.

They saw the last vestige of him disappear forever.

"He's like a broken spirit brooding over the neighborhood," Hastings
said, shivering despite himself.

Julia began to crochet again, nervously absorbed in what she was doing.

"His scattered, crazy words are like the last gasp of the little
village. Ho