She shook her head with a sudden doubt. “It is a problem,” she said, “which my knowledge of geometry does not help me to solve.”
“No,” assented he; “and one in which even your fanciful soul would fail to find any poetry. But stop, Paula; isn’t this the place where I found you that day, and you showed me the view up the river?”
“Yes, and it was on that stone I sat; it has a milk-white cushion now; and there is where you stood, looking so tall and grand to my childish eyes! The gates are of pearl now,” she said, pointing to the snow-covered slopes in the west. “I wish the sky had been clear to-night and you could have seen the effect of a rosy sunset falling over those domes of ice and snow.”
“It would leave me less to expect when I come again,” he responded almost gayly. “The next time we will have the sunset, Paula.”
She smiled and they hastened on, presently finding themselves in the village streets. Suddenly she paused. “Small towns have their mysteries as well as great cities,” said she; “we are not without ours, look.”
He turned, followed with a glance the direction of her pointing finger and started in his sudden surprise. She had indicated to him the house whose ghostly and frowning front bore written across its grim gray boards, such an inscription of painful remembrance. “It is a solitary looking place, isn’t it?” she went on, innocent of the pain she was inflicting. “No one lives there or ever will, I imagine. Do you see that board nailed across the front door?”
He forced himself to look. He did more, he fixed his eyes upon the desolate structure before him until the aspect of its huge unpainted walls with their long rows of sealed-up windows and high smokeless chimneys was impressed indelibly upon his mind. The large front door with its weird and solemn barrier was the last thing upon which his eye rested.
“Yes,” said he, and involuntarily asked what it meant.
“We do not know exactly,” she responded. “It was nailed across there by the men who followed Colonel Japha to the grave. Colonel Japha was the owner of the house,” she proceeded, too interested to observe the shadow which the utterance of that name had invoked upon his brow. “He was a peculiar man I judge, and had suffered great wrongs they say; at all events his life was very solitary and sad, and on his deathbed he made his neighbors promise him that they would carry out his body through that door and then seal it up against any further ingress or egress forever. His wishes were respected, and from that day to this no one has ever entered that door.”
“But the house!” stammered Mr. Sylvester in anything but his usual tone, “surely it has not been deserted all these years!”