“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.”