with him.

At some distance from the house where he was residing, in the midst of
large deserted grounds, overrun with grass and weeds, there stood a
mournful-looking, unoccupied private residence of some architectural
pretensions, on the building of which a considerable sum had evidently
been expended. The place took M. Zola's fancy the first time he passed it
on his bicycle. The iron entrance gate was broken, and he was able to
enter the garden and peep through the ground-floor windows.

All spoke of decay and abandonment; and when, through my daughter, M.
Zola began to make inquiries about the place, he was told a fantastic
tragic story. A murder, it was said, had been committed there many years
previously; a poor little girl had been killed by her stepmother, and her
remains had been buried beneath a scullery floor.

There was also talk of the child's father, who at night drove up to the
house in a phantom carriage drawn by ghostly horses, and hammered at the
door of the mansion and shouted aloud for his dead child!

The story was alleged to be well known, and it was said that not a girl
from Chertsey to Esher, from Walton to Byfleet, would have dared to pass
that house after nightfall, when harrowing voices rang out through the
trees, and the shadowy horses of the ghostly carriage trotted swiftly and
silently over the gravel.

The story not only impressed my daughter Violette, but it greatly
interested M. Zola, on whose behalf I made various inquiries. For
instance, I closely questioned an old gardener who had known the district
for long years. All he could tell me, however, was that there were
certainly some strange rumours abroad among the womenfolk, but that for
his own part he had never heard of any crime and had never seen any
ghost.

And at last others told me quite a different story of the house's
abandonment, and this I here venture to give, though I certainly cannot
vouch for its accuracy. The place had been built, it seemed, some forty
years previously by a retired and wealthy London pawnbroker, a gaunt,
shrivelled old man, who, mounted on a white mare, had in his declining
years been a familiar figure on the roads of the district.

Extremely eccentric, he had largely furnished and decorated the house
with unredeemed articles that had been pledged with him. There was
nothing _en suite_. Old chairs of divers patterns were mingled with odd
tables and sideboards and sofas; there were also innumerable