She did not know; she supposed it was lonesome; he never stayed home for over a couple of months, and then would be off, for no one knew how long. Sometimes he went to Europe, and was gone two or three years at a time. And such dull times as it was then at Rutledge, if you please! Nobody but Mrs. Roberts, and the cook, and dairy-woman, besides the farm hands. Nothing to do but stand Mrs. Roberts' preaching from morning till night. She only wished she'd lived in the old times that her father talked about, when Rutledge was the gayest of the gay. (Her father, she explained, had been gardener there for thirty years, and had lived on the place from a boy.) Such fine doings! Ah! if Mr. Rutledge would only take it into his head to have such times now! It was when he was very young, and Mr. Richard and Miss Alice, and there was nothing but balls and picnics and pleasure-parties all the time, company staying in the house, and visitors from the neighborhood for miles around. Ah! it was mighty different now!
"What has become of the others? Is Mr. Rutledge the only one left?"
Mr. Rutledge, Kitty told me, was the youngest of the three. Mr. Richard died when he was just twenty-four—a month after his father—and so Mr. Rutledge came into the property when he was a mere lad.
"But the daughter, Alice, what became of her?"
"I don't know exactly," said Kitty, lowering her voice, and looking anxiously toward the door. "They never talk about her; something must have happened very strange, for there's always a mystery about Miss Alice. The old servants on the place will never say a word about her; and though I've teased father again and again, I never could get anything out of him."
"But, Kitty," I exclaimed eagerly, my curiosity thoroughly excited, "what makes you think she isn't dead?"
"Oh! that much I know, that she didn't die then, and that she didn't die at home in this house, and isn't buried there below in the churchyard by the others; and I know she was away when old Mr. Rutledge died; because once father said it was an awful thing, when he lay so ill, and out of his head, to hear him call upon her to come home. All that night before he died, he would call 'Alice! Alice!' till you could hear it all over the house. And father says," continued the girl, in a still lower tone, "that sometimes of wild dark nights, when he's coming past the house late from his work, he could swear for all the world that he hears the old man still calling 'Alice! Alice!' till it makes his blood freeze to listen to it. And then, when I say 'Where was she, father, all the time, and why didn't she come to him?' he always says, 'that's not for the like of you to hear about; it's none of your business, child, nor mine,' and sends me off about something else."
"But, Kitty," I persisted, "is that all you know of her? Tell me all you've ever heard; was she pretty?"
"Oh, so pretty! You can't think how white her skin was, and her eyes like violets, so large and blue, and curls all over her head—loose, shiny curls."
"How do you know," I said quickly; "surely you never saw her, did you?"