“Is it—far?” I asked weakly with a hostile glance at Mr. Bangs’ baggage on the floor at my feet.
“Not more’n ten minutes’ walk. You can leave the case here if you want.”
This seemed an inspired suggestion. And so without further delay, we set off in the direction the woman indicated. The road branched off the regular motor highway and climbed casually upward, between uneven stone walls and dusty foliage. “I never expected,” Eve remarked, “to spend the first day of my vacation trailing a barber!”
“Mrs. Trap said he was in the real estate line.”
“I know. But don’t forget the bottles of hair tonic.”
“I’m not likely to, if I have to lug them about the country much more.”
We walked for perhaps ten minutes without appearing to be getting anywhere in particular. But as we neared the brow of the hill, we spied above the trees at a distance back from the road the gray roof of a house. “This must be the place, don’t you think?” Eve said. “It doesn’t look as if anybody lived here.”
It certainly didn’t! The big front yard was a perfect jungle of coarse grass and overgrown bushes and a generally deserted and gone-to-seed air hung about the whole place. But as we paused there a moment in the dusty road surveying it, there drifted out to us a wave of delicate perfume—the scent of flowering rose bushes in the sun—which was like a gesture of welcome.
Plain but substantial and built to last, as the early settlers were wont to build them, Craven House stood staunchly waiting for what fate held in store for it. The blinds were closed and the weatherbeaten shingles showed more than one gap where the wind and weather had made headway.
Suddenly there came over me that curious feeling one has at times of having been there before. “What’s the matter,” Eve inquired. “You look as if you expected to see a ghost or something!”