“Studious habits are rather forced on one out here, I should say. In my own case my course of reading is all cut out for me.”
He ran his eyes over the room.
“The Glenarm collection is famous,—the best in the country, easily. Mr. Glenarm, your grandfather, was certainly an enthusiast. I met him several times; he was a trifle hard to meet,”—and the clergyman smiled.
I felt rather uncomfortable, assuming that he probably knew I was undergoing discipline, and why my grandfather had so ordained it. The Reverend Paul Stoddard was so simple, unaffected and manly a fellow that I shrank from the thought that I must appear to him an ungrateful blackguard whom my grandfather had marked with obloquy.
“My grandfather had his whims; but he was a fine, generous-hearted old gentleman,” I said.
“Yes; in my few interviews with him he surprised me by the range of his knowledge. He was quite able to instruct me in certain curious branches of church history that had appealed to him.”
“You were here when he built the house, I suppose?”
My visitor laughed cheerfully.
“I was on my side of the barricade for a part of the time. You know there was a great deal of mystery about the building of this house. The country-folk hereabouts can’t quite get over it. They have a superstition that there’s treasure buried somewhere on the place. You see, Mr. Glenarm wouldn’t employ any local labor. The work was done by men he brought from afar,—none of them, the villagers say, could speak English. They were all Greeks or Italians.”
“I have heard something of the kind,” I remarked, feeling that here was a man who with a little cultivating might help me to solve some of my riddles.