“I do,” Miss Selenski replied, hurrying to add, “But I did not fit it up. The ladies did that. It has all the modern appliances that help to make housekeeping easy, and once every week a teacher comes here to instruct the neighborhood women how to cook, clean and sew; in fact, how to live. And the lessons and demonstrations are given in this apartment.”
When the girls were again in the office, Gloria turned to their new acquaintance, saying, “Do you happen to know of any place around here that is vacant where we might like to live?”
At first Miss Selenski shook her head. Then she added, with a queer little smile, “Not unless you’re willing to live in the old Pensinger mansion.”
Then she went on to explain: “Long, long ago, when New York was little more than a village, and Seventy-eighth Street was country, all along the East River there were, here and there, handsome mansion-like homes and vast grounds. Oh, so different from what it is now! Every once in a while you find one of these old dwellings still standing.
“Some of them house many poor families, but the Pensinger mansion is seldom occupied. If a family is brave enough to move in, before many weeks the ‘for rent’ sign is again at the door. The rent is almost nothing, but—” the girl hesitated, then went on to say, “Maybe I ought not to tell you the story about the old place if you have any thought of living there.”
“Oh, please tell it! Is it a ghost story?” Bobs begged, and Gloria added, “Yes, do tell it, Miss Selenski. We are none of us afraid of ghosts.”
“Of course you aren’t,” Miss Selenski agreed, “and, for that matter, neither am I. But nearly all of our neighbors are superstitious. Mr. Tenowitz, the grocer at the corner of First and Seventy-ninth has the renting of the place, and he declares that the last tenant rushed into his store early one morning, paid his bill and departed without a word of explanation, but he looked, Mr. Tenowitz told me, as though he had seen a ghost. I don’t think there is anything the matter with the old house,” their informant continued, “except just loneliness.
“Of course, big, barnlike rooms, when they are empty, echo every sound in a mournful manner without supernatural aid.”
“But how did it all start?” Bobs inquired. “Did anything of an unusual nature ever happen there?”
Miss Selenski nodded, and then continued: “The story is that the only daughter of the last of the Pensingers who lived there disappeared one night and was never again seen. Her mother, so the tale goes, wished her to marry an elderly English nobleman, but she loved a poor Hungarian violinist whom she was forbidden to see. Because of her grief, she did many strange things, and one of them was to walk at midnight, dressed all in white, along the brink of the dark swirling river which edged the wide lawn in front of her home. Her white silk shawl was found on the bank one morning and the lovely Marilyn Pensinger was never seen again.