though Miss Ludington would not have grudged the money had they been ten
times greater. However, seeing that the part of the village duplicated
consisted of but one broad maple-planted street, with not over thirty
houses, mostly a story and a half, and that none of the buildings, except
the school-house, the little meeting-house, and the homestead, were
finished inside, the outlay was not greater than an elaborate plan of
landscape gardening would have involved.

The furniture and fittings of the Massachusetts homestead, to the least
detail, had been used to fit up its Long Island duplicate, and when all
was complete and Miss Ludington had settled down to housekeeping, she
felt more at home than in ten years past.

True, the village which she had restored was empty; but it was not more
empty than the other Hilton had been to her these many years, since her
old schoolmates had been metamorphosed into staid fathers and mothers.
These respectable persons were not the schoolmates and friends of her
girlhood, and with no hard feelings toward them, she had still rather
resented seeing them about, as tending to blur her recollections of their
former selves, in whom alone she was interested.

That her new Long Island neighbours considered her mildly insane was to
her the least of all concerns. The only neighbours she cared about were
the shadowy forms which peopled the village she had rescued from
oblivion, whose faces she fancied smiling gratefully at her from the
windows of the homes she had restored to them.

For she had a notion that the spirits of her old neighbours, long dead,
had found out this resurrected Hilton, and were grateful for the
opportunity to revisit the unaltered scenes of their passion. If she had