“Now, let’s go to the ruin and the grave,” she said to Roy, who shrugged his shoulders, thinking he was bound on a rather gruesome business.
“I shall have to ask the way to both places, as I believe they lie in different directions,” he said, and turning to Mr. Taylor he began to make inquiries as to the best way of reaching the Dalton ruin and the cemetery and where to find ’Tina’s grave.
“Want to see that suller?” Uncle Zacheus exclaimed. “Why, all the timbers has fell in and there’s nothin’ left but a hole. I wonder it hain’t been sold afore now, though nobody wants it, there’s so much stuff told to this day about the ghost. They say she carries a candle now. In my opinion she’s enough to do repentin’, without spookin’ round where she used to live. I beg your pardon, Miss Hilton. I forgot I was speakin’ of your grandmarm, who lived more than a hundred years before you,” he said to Fanny, who was pale to her lips.
She knew he meant no harm and tried to smile, but it was a pitiful kind of smile, which made Roy’s heart ache for her.
“Poor little Fan,” he said, when they were out in the street. “This is a hard day for you. Hadn’t you better give up the ruin?”
“No;” she said resolutely. “I want to see what my father called his ancestral hall. It was there he asked mother to marry him. I made her tell me all about it. They sat on an old settee, and there were rats in the room. Oh, this must be where we turn, and there is the curb to the well they threw him in,” she added, as they reached the lane which led to the ruin.
When walking through the village Fanny had kept apart from Roy, but now she clung closely to him as they went down the road till they came to what was once the front entrance to the house. Window frames, door posts, heavy joists and portions of the roof lay piled together, with the dried remnants of the last summer’s weeds showing among the debris. The day was not cold for November, but the sky was leaden and there was a feeling of rain in the air. The trees were bare and the dead leaves lay in the path, or were piled against the fence and wall. There was no place to sit down and Fanny would not have sat if there had been. She was in a kind of dream, going over in imagination the events of more than a century ago. At last Roy brought her back to reality by kicking at a part of what might have been a pier to the wall and which, giving way, went crashing down into the cellar.
“What a pile of rubbish and what a place for ’Tina to promenade! I don’t wonder she brings a candle. She would certainly break her neck in the dark if it had not already been broken,” he said, without a thought as to how the last of his remark sounded.
But Fanny thought, and with a plaintive cry said to him, “Oh, Roy, how can you joke about my grandmother? You’d feel differently if she were yours.”
“She is mine,” Roy replied, “or is going to be, and what I said about her neck was rather mean. Honestly, though, Fan, you are too morbid over an affair which everybody has forgotten and for which you are in no way responsible. Let’s get away from here.”