the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in
the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust
and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growingly aware of
them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn't
name them all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how
often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see
for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that
absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing
but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the burglar. Mrs.
Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the
visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and
throwing up sashes--all to show them, as she remarked, how little there
was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell
where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the
style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master
their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's,
some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a retiring-
pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that, glad as she was
to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped
he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come
in after dark she would just tell him, if he "plased," that he must ask
it of somebody else.

The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy
woman against what one _might_ see, and she put it frankly to Miss
Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "craping up
to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light
were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march
through the great grey rooms--so many of them as there were too!--with
her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile