fancy the face of a pitiable, dishonoured corpse. The soul of it
was gone forever--that peculiar spirit of place which makes every
old house the guardian of an inner life--the keeper of a family's
ghost. What remained was but the outer husk, the disfigured
frame, upon which the newer imprint seemed only a passing insult.

On the high wainscoted walls he could still trace the vacant
dust-marked squares where the Blake portraits had once
hung--lines that the successive scrubbings of fifteen years had
not utterly effaced. A massive mahogany sofa, carved to represent
a horn of plenty, had been purchased, perhaps at a general sale
of the old furniture, with several quaint rosewood chairs and a
rare cabinet of inlaid woods. For the rest, the later additions
were uniformly cheap and ill-chosen--a blue plush "set," bought,
possibly, at a village store, a walnut table with a sallow marble
top, and several hard engravings of historic subjects.

When the lawyer turned from a curious inspection of these works
of art, he saw that only a curtain of flimsy chintz, stretched
between a pair of fluted columns, separated him from the
adjoining room, where a lamp, with lowered wick, was burning
under a bright red shade. After a moment's hesitation he drew the
curtain aside and entered what he took at once to be the common
living-room of the Fletcher family.

Here the effect was less depressing, though equally
uninteresting--a paper novel or two on the big Bible upon the
table combined, indeed, with a costly piano in one corner, to
strike a note that was entirely modern. The white crocheted
tidies on the chair-backs, elaborated with endless patience out