III.


"The house they had taken was rather a lonely place, out of sight of
neighbors, which they had got cheap because it was so isolated and
inconvenient, I fancy. Of course Mrs. Ormond, with her exaggeration,
represented it as a sort of solitude which nobody but tramps of the most
dangerous description ever visited. As she said, she never went to sleep
without expecting to wake up murdered in her bed."

"Like her," said Minver, with a glance at me full of relish for the touch
of character which I would feel with him.

"She said," Wanhope went on, "that she was anxious from the first for the
effect upon Ormond. In the stress of any danger, she gave me to
understand, he always behaved very well, but out of its immediate
presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy apprehensions, unless the
surroundings were cheerful. She could not imagine how he came to take the
place, but when she told him so--"

"I've no doubt she told him so pretty promptly," the painter grinned.

"--he explained that he had seen it on a brilliant day in spring, when
all the trees were in bloom, and the bees humming in the blossoms, and
the orioles singing, and the outlook from the lawn down over the river
valley was at its best. He had fallen in love with the place, that was
the truth, and he was so wildly in love with it all through that he could
not feel the defect she did in it. He used to go gaily about the wide,