“When I fit up my den for a bride, then I will,” he retorted, and the audacious little thing became dumb on this subject, though she showed no inclination for dropping the other.
“Dear Dr. Izard,” she pursued, “I know I ought to be going home, but I have something more to ask, and it isn’t always that you allow me to speak to you. Our house—you know what I mean, my father’s and mother’s house,—is it really haunted, and is that why it is shut up, even from me?”
“Do you want to go into it, Polly?”
“No—and yet I have sometimes thought I should like to. It must be full of relics of my parents, and if it has not been disturbed since my father went away, why, I might almost see the prints of his feet on the floors, and the pressure of his form in the old lounges and chairs.”
“You are too imaginative!” cried the doctor. “They will have to marry you to some practical man.”
She flushed, drew back and seemed on the point of uttering some violent protest or indignant reproach, but instead of that she returned to the original topic.
“I should like to hear from your lips, which never exaggerate or add the least bit of romance to anything you say, just the story of my father’s departure and that sudden shutting up of the house. I think I ought to know now that I am a grown woman and have money of my own.”
“Will you go, after I have told you all that there is to know?” he asked, with just a touch of impatience in his naturally severe tone.
“Yes,” she laughed, irresistibly moved by his appearance of ill-nature. “I won’t stay one minute longer than you wish me to. Only,” she added, with the sobriety more in accordance with the theme they were discussing, “do make the whole thing clear to me. I have heard so many stories and all of them so queer.”
He frowned, and his face underwent an indescribable change.