In spite of the horror of the neighborhood, she took up her abode at Suicide Place, declaring herself poor and unable to make a home elsewhere. Here she lived alone with her child, as neither man-servant nor maid-servant would have gone inside the gates for love or money.
And here, after a few months’ solitude, Mrs. Fane, overcome by the terrible, mysterious spirit of the old place, succumbed to the mania of her family and poisoned herself.
John Banks, who had been employed by the woman to mend her gates, heard the frightened shrieks of little Floy one morning when he came to his work, and most reluctantly entered the house.
He found Mrs. Fane dead, with a bottle of poison clutched in her stiffened hand. She had been dead for hours.
The carpenter took the orphan child to his own home, and into his big, generous heart. Then he reported the case, after which there was a coroner’s inquest and a verdict of suicide by poison.
Enough money was found in the house to bury her decently, and then the old place was left to its grim solitude again.
This was Florence Fane’s inheritance—the old farm that none would rent or buy, and the terrible taint of blood that made her an object of a romantic interest and pity to the many who knew what must be her probable fate.
But, strange to say, the child herself knew and laughed at these whisperings. She had no superstition in her make-up; and, although forbidden by her adopted parents to enter even the gates, she was in the habit of going secretly to the old house and rambling through it at will. She even declared that she would go and live there, if any one would bear her company; but no one accepted her defiant challenge to fate.
Meanwhile, the time was approaching when the grim, unappeasable Moloch of the place would demand, in all probability, its fifth victim. It was shunned like the plague, for all remembered that not only the family, but one of no kith or kin, had met self-sought death there. None but Floy ventured near the place—willful Floy, who laughed to scorn their predictions that she would be the next sacrifice. When they tried to reason with her, she would not listen to their warnings, darting away like a gay, elusive little humming-bird.
When St. George Beresford turned away from the gate where he had watched Fly-away Floy out of sight, he knew that his heart had gone with her forever, and that he never had, and never could love Maybelle Maury as she wished to have him do—for he had long since fathomed the tender secret of her heart. The knowledge made him feel very pitiful toward the poor girl, and rendered him so abstracted that she guessed the change in him directly, and became furiously jealous of her unconscious rival, merry little Floy.