“Alone? Without Celine?” Mrs. Tracy said in some surprise.
“Yes, without Celine, but not alone. Mr. Hilton is going with me,” Helen answered, a little defiantly, in anticipation of her mother’s next remark.
“Do you think it proper to be walking in the evening with a comparative stranger? Do you think Mr. Mason would like it?”
“Oh, bother, mamma! Don’t be so prudish. I am to be trusted, and so is Mr. Hilton. As for Craig he will not object. I am not going to tie myself up in a bag because I am engaged. By-by, don’t worry about me.”
She kissed her hand and went out to the piazza, where Mark was waiting for her, with a light in his eyes and a ring in his voice she had never heard or seen before, and which put her on her guard. They went first to the post office where the evening mail was being distributed and where Helen found a letter from Craig, mailed in Boston at 4 o’clock and written after the telegram had been sent. Mark, who was standing apart from her, only saw that she had a letter and crushed it hastily into her pocket. Leaving the office they walked slowly around the square until they came to the turn in the road which led past the old ruin. The sun had been down for half an hour or more, and the full moon was pouring a flood of light upon it, making it look rather ghostly and weird, with the woodbine dropping from the chimney and a lilac tree brushing against one of the broken windows.
“Have you ever been in my ancestral hall?” Mark asked.
“No, and I don’t believe I care to visit it,” Helen replied.
“Oh, yes, you do. All the young people in town come here. It is quite a rendezvous for lovers,” Mark urged.
“But we are not lovers,” Helen said, and he replied, “Very true, but we can go in for all that. Perhaps we may see the ghost, if there is one. She comes in the moonlight, they say, as well as in the rain. You surely are not afraid?”
Helen was not afraid, and only held back from a feeling that it was not quite the thing to do. At last her love of adventure overcame her sense of propriety, and she followed Mark to the rear of the house where a door had fallen from its hinges, giving them free access to the building. Through the lane to this door a path had been worn by many feet, and Helen could well believe that it was a rendezvous for lovers, who either had no fear of ’Tina, or came hoping to see her. “It would have been a great deal more romantic for Craig to have told his love here than while holding Dido in to keep her from running and screaming at the top of his voice to make me hear, the wheels made such a clatter over the stones and ruts,” she thought, as she followed Mark in to what had been the family room where ’Tina sat when the tragedy outside went on and where the baby boy called so often for his mother. Through the paneless window the moonlight was shining, making the room almost as light as day, except in the corners where dark shadows lay. Something was stirring in one of them and with a cry of fear Helen pressed close to Mark, who took her hand and led her to an old settee which stood by the wide fire place.