“O Miss Paula, what do you think?” cried Sarah, creeping slowly towards her from the spectral recesses of a dim corner. “Jane says Mr. Sylvester was up all last night too. She heard him go downstairs about midnight and he went through all the rooms like a gliding spectre and into her room too!” she fearfully whispered; “and what he did there no one knows, but when he came out he locked the door, and this morning the cook heard him give orders to Samuel to have the trunks that were ready in Mrs. Sylvester’s room taken away. O Miss, do you think he can be going to give all those beautiful things to you?”
Paula recoiled in horror. “Sarah!” said she, and could say no more. The vision of that tall form gliding through the desolate house at midnight, bending over the soulless finery of his dead wife, perhaps stowing it away in boxes, came with too powerful a suggestion to her mind.
“Shure, I thought you would be pleased,” murmured the girl and disappeared again into one of the dim recesses.
“Will he let me go without a word?”
“Miss Paula, Mr. Bertram Sylvester is waiting at the door in a carriage,” came in low respectful tones to her ears, and Samuel’s face full of regret appeared at the top of the stairs.
“I am coming,” murmured the sad-hearted girl, and with a sob which she could not control, she took her last look of the pretty pink chamber in which she had dreamed so many dreams of youthful delight, and perhaps of youthful sorrow also, and slowly descended the stairs. Suddenly as she was passing a door on the second floor, she heard a low deep cry.
“Paula!”