Floy was heiress by her birth to a small estate and to a terrible taint of blood—the mania for suicide.
She was a descendant of the Nellest family, that for forty years had numbered in each decade a suicide among its members.
The scene of these tragedies was at an old farm-house on a lonely road two miles from Mount Vernon.
The house, a substantial and somewhat pretentious structure of rough dark stone, overgrown picturesquely in many places with creeping ivy, stood back from the road in a magnificent grove of old oak-trees, and twenty-five acres of rich farming land stretched away in the rear.
But so grewsome was the reputation of the place, that for nine years it had had no tenants, and its name had changed, by tacit consent of the neighborhood, from Nellest Farm to Suicide Place.
The Nellest family had owned and tilled this farm almost a hundred years, but in the middle of the century the head of the family had committed suicide by cutting his throat, and just ten years later, his only son was found hanging from a tree near the spot where his father died.
The widow of the son, with her only daughter, continued to reside at the farm, employing a competent man to manage it. But when another decade rolled around, the neighborhood was horrified to learn that the manager had shot himself in the head, adding the third to the list of deaths by suicidal mania.
Horrified and unnerved by all these tragedies, Widow Nellest fled from the place with her beautiful young daughter, leaving the property in the hands of a lawyer for rent or sale.
But neither buyer nor tenant could be found, and successive crops of weeds ripened and died on the untilled acres. The poorest beggar would have refused to live there rent-free.
At almost the end of the next decade the daughter of Widow Nellest returned to the place in widow’s weeds, and with a child seven years old. Her mother had died of a broken heart, she said, and she herself had been married and widowed.