cakes in the Benton parlor as commands, no less, and had taken the
long carriage-ride from the city with complacency. And now Miss
Emily, last of the family, had begged me to take the house.

In the end, as has been shown, I agreed. The glamor of the past
had perhaps something to do with it. But I have come to a time of
life when, failing intimate interests of my own, my neighbors'
interests are mine by adoption. To be frank, I came because I was
curious. Why, aside from a money consideration, was the Benton
house to be occupied by an alien household? It was opposed to every
tradition of the family as I had heard of it.

I knew something of the family history: the Reverend Thaddeus Benton,
rector of Saint Bartholomew, who had forsaken the frame rectory near
the church to build himself the substantial home now being offered
me; Miss Emily, his daughter, who must now, I computed, be nearly
seventy; and a son whom I recalled faintly as hardly bearing out the
Benton traditions of solidity and rectitude.

The Reverend Mr. Benton, I recalled, had taken the stand that his
house was his own, and having moved his family into it, had
thereafter, save on great occasions, received the congregation
individually or en masse, in his study at the church. A patriarchal
old man, benevolent yet austere, who once, according to a story I
had heard in my girlhood, had horsewhipped one of his vestrymen for
trifling with the affections of a young married woman in the village!

There was a gap of thirty years in my knowledge of the family. I
had, indeed, forgotten its very existence, when by the chance of a
newspaper advertisement I found myself involved vitally in its