“Did you hear how much money it was?” timidly asked an old man who had just joined the group.
“It was just the same amount as was paid Ephraim Earle for his invention a few days before we saw the last of him.”
“Lord-a-mercy!”
“And which——”
“Now this is too interesting for anything,” exclaimed a female voice from a window overhead. “Twenty thousand dollars, really? What a romance. I must run and see Polly this minute.”
“Stop her!” came in guttural command from the landlord to his wife.
“And why should I stop her?” asked that good woman, with a jolly roll of her head. “Instead of stopping her, I think I will go with her. But do let us hear more about it first. What was the name of the man who left her this splendid fortune?”
“Abram Hazlitt. Somebody who lived out west.”
From the looks that flew from one to the other and from the doubtful shakes of the head visible on every side, this was, as the speaker had declared, an utterly unknown name. The interest became intense.
“I always thought there was something wrong about Ephraim’s disappearance. No man as good as he would have left a child like that of his own free will.”
“What! do you think this man Hazlitt had anything to do——”
“Hush, hush.”
The monition came from more than one pair of lips; and even the man with the dog looked up. A young lady was coming down the street.
“There she is now.”
“She’s coming here.”
“No; more likely she’s on her way to tell the doctor of her good luck.”
“Look, she has the same old smile.”
“And the same dress.”
“Wa’al she’s pretty, anyhow.”
“And such a sunbeam!”
Yelp! went the dog again. His master had trod on his tail for the second time. Meanwhile the cause of all this excitement had reached the walk in front of the house. Though she was tripping along in a merry fashion which was all her own, she stopped as she met Mrs. Husted’s eye, and, calling her down, whispered something in her ear. Then with a backward nod the young girl passed on, and everyone drew a long breath. There was something so satisfactory to them all in her ingenuous manner and simple expression of youthful delight.
She was a slight girl, and to those who had seen her every day for the last dozen years she was simply prettier than usual, but to the two or three strangers observing her she was a vision of madcap beauty that for the moment made every other woman previously seen forgotten. Her face, which was heart-shaped and fresh as a newly-opened rose, was flushed with laughter, and the dimples which came and went with every breath so distracted the eye that it was not till she had turned her lovely countenance aside that one remembered the violet hues in her heavily-lashed eyes and the hints of feeling which emanated from them. That, with all the dignities of her new-born heirship upon her, she swung a white sunbonnet on her delicate forefinger was characteristic of the girl. The hair thus revealed to sight was of a glistening chestnut, whose somewhat rumpled curls were deliciously in keeping with the saucy poise of the unquiet head. Altogether a decided gleam of sunshine, made all the more conspicuously bright from the hints just given of the tragic history of her parents and the shadows surrounding the very gift which had called up all this pleasure into her face.
“What did she say?” whispered more than one voice as the landlady came slowly back.
“She invited me to visit her, and hinted that she had something to tell me,” was the somewhat important reply.
“And when are you going?” asked one more eager than the rest.
“I may go back with her when she returns from Dr. Izard’s,” was the cool and consequential response. Evidently the landlady had been raised in her own estimation by the notice given her by this former little waif.
“I wonder,” someone now ventured, “if she is going to buy the big house over the doctor’s office. I noticed that the windows were open to-day.”
“Pshaw, and her father’s house lying idle?”
“Her father’s house! Good gracious, would you have the child go there?”
“You make the chills run over me.”
“Nobody would go into that house with her. It hasn’t been opened in fourteen years.”
“The more shame,” growled the landlord.
“She’ll never have anything to do with that. I’ve seen her run by it myself, as if the very shadow it cast was terrifying to her.”
“Yet folks thought it was a cozy home when Ephraim took his young wife there. I remember, myself, the brass andirons in the parlor and the long row of books in the big hall upstairs. To think that those books have never been opened these fourteen years, nor the floors trod on, nor the curtains drawn back! I declare, it’s the most creepy thing of the whole affair.”
“And how do you know that the floor hasn’t been walked on, nor the curtains drawn, since we took the child out from her desolate corner in the old bed-room upstairs?” suggested another voice in an odd, mysterious tone.
“Because the doors were locked and the keys put where no one in the town could get at ’em. We thought it best; there was death on the walls everywhere, and the child had no money to be brought up in any such a grand way as that.”
“Folks as I mean don’t need keys,” murmured the other under his breath. But the suggestion, if it were such, was immediately laughed down.
“You’re a fool, Jacob; we’re in the nineteenth century now, the era of electric lights and trolley cars.”
“I know; I know; but I’ve seen more than once on a dark night the shifting of a light behind those drawn curtains, and once——”
But the laughter was against him and he desisted, and another man spoke up—the lodger with the sallow face: “Why didn’t they sell the old place if the child was left as poor as you say?”
“Why, man, its owner might be living. Ephraim Earle only disappeared, you know, and might have returned any day. Leastwise that is what we thought then. Now, we no longer expect it. I wonder who’ll act as her guardian.”
“She’s of age; she don’t need no guardian.”
“Well, it’s a precious mystery, the whole thing. I wonder if the police won’t see something in it?”
“Bah, police! They had the chance at the thing fourteen years ago. And what did they do with it? Nothing.”
“But now there’s a clue. This man Hazlitt knew what became of Ephraim Earle, or why did he leave that very same amount to his daughter?”
“Lor’ knows. She’s a taking minx and perhaps——”
“Well, perhaps——”
“Hazlitt wasn’t his name, don’t you see?”
This new theory started fresh talk and much excited reasoning, but as it was of the most ignorant sort, it is scarcely worth our while to record it. Meanwhile the twilight gave way to darkness and Polly Earle failed to reappear. When it was quite dark, the stragglers separated, and then it was seen that the man with the dog had fallen asleep in his chair.
Someone strove to wake him.
“Come, come, friend,” said he; “you’ll be getting the rheumatiz if you don’t look out. This isn’t the right kind of air to sleep in.”
The old wayfarer yawned, opened his strange, uneasy eyes, and