The pout on her lips bespoke the spoiled child, but her little hands were trembling, and he seemed to see only that.
“Polly,”—he spoke harshly, for he did not like young girls, or women at all for that matter,—“I knew many things which I have let slip from my memory. When your father and I were young we were more or less intimate, being both of us students and ambitious of doing something worth while in this world. But after his disappearance and the unfortunate surmises to which it gave rise, I made a business of forgetting any confidential communications with which he may have entrusted me, and I advise you not to stir up old griefs by driving me to recall them now.”
“But you were my mother’s physician and saw my father just before he went away.”
“Yes.”
“And did he have twenty thousand dollars in money? They say so, but it seems incredible to me, who only remember my father as looking worried and poor.”
“Twenty thousand dollars was paid him two weeks before your mother died.”
“And he carried all that away with him and never left a dollar to his little motherless child? Oh, I know that some people say he was foully dealt with and that it was not of his own free will that he left me to the mercies of the town. But I never believed that. I have always thought of him as alive, and many is the night I have waked up crying—Oh, I can cry at night and in the darkness, if I do laugh all day when the sun shines—because I dreamt he was enjoying himself in foreign lands while I—” she stopped, looking inquiringly at Dr. Izard, and he, startled, looked inquiringly at her, then for the second time he rose up, and taking the light, went out to search up and down the ghostly waste before him, for what he rather felt than knew was near.
“Oh, how late it is getting!” cried the little maiden, peering over his shoulder. “Did you think you heard someone sigh? I thought I did, but who would come creeping up to this spot? Do you know,” she exclaimed, drawing him in just as he was about to turn his attention to the side of the house against which they stood, “that I believe it’s that horrid green door which gives people the shivers when they come here. Why is it there and what is on the other side of it that you bar it up like that?”
The doctor, lifting his abstracted gaze, stared at the door for a moment, then turned moodily away. “It was the old way of going upstairs,” he remarked. “Why shouldn’t I bar it, since I have no further use for the rest of the house?”
“But its color,” she persisted; “why do you not paint it white?”