departure, my sister wrote, he seemed absolutely to haunt the
empty house by the Blue Rocks. He undoubtedly went here to
sketch, she thought. The house was in charge of a real-estate
agent,--a retired landscape-painter, whose pictures did not sell
so profitably as their originals; and her theory was, that this
agent hoped to make our friend buy the place, and so allured him
there under pretence of sketching. Moreover, she surmised, he was
studying some effect of shadow, because, unlike most men, he
appeared in decent spirits only on cloudy days. It is always so
easy to fit a man out with a set of ready-made motives! But I
drew my own conclusions, and was not surprised to hear, soon
after, that Severance was seriously ill.

This brought me back at once,--sailing down from Providence in an
open boat, I remember, one lovely moonlight night. Next day I saw
Severance, who declared that he had suffered from nothing worse
than a prolonged sick-headache. I soon got out of him all that
had happened. He had seen the figure in the window every sunny
day, he said. Of course he had, if he chose to look for it, and I
could only smile, though it perhaps seemed unkind. But I stopped
smiling when he went on to tell that, not satisfied with these
observations, he had visited the house by moonlight also, and had
then seen, as he averred, a second figure standing beside the
first.

Of course, there was no defence against such a theory as this,
except simply to laugh it down; but it made me very anxious, for
it showed that he was growing thoroughly morbid. "Either it was
pure fancy," I said, "or it was Paul the gardener."