you must have nothing to do with such uncanny folk.” And endeavoring to turn off this irresistible display of feeling by a show of pleasantry he laughed aloud, but in a strained and unnatural way that made her eyes lift in unconscious amazement.
“You are infected by the atmosphere of unreality that pervades the spot,” said she, “I do not wonder.” And with the gentle perversity that sometimes affects the most thoughtful amongst us, she went on talking upon the unwelcome subject. “I know of some folks who invariably cross to the other side of the street at night, rather than go through the shadows of the two gaunt poplars which guard that house. Yet there has been no murder committed there or any great crime that I know of, unless the disobedience of a daughter who ran away with a man her father detested, could be denominated by so fearful a word.”
The set gaze with which Mr. Sylvester surveyed the landscape before him quavered a trifle and then grew hard and cold. “And so,” said he in a tone meant more for himself than her, “even your innocent ears have been assailed by the gossip about Miss Japha.”
“Gossip! I have never thought of it as gossip,” returned she, struck for the first time by the change in his appearance. “It all happened so long ago it seems more like some quaint and ancient tale than a story of one of our neighbors. Besides, the fact that a wilful girl ran away from the house of her father, with the man of her choice, is not such a dreadful one is it, though she never returned to its walls with her husband, and her father was so overwhelmed by the shock, he was never seen to smile again.”
“No,” said he, giving her a hurried glance of relief, “I only wondered at the tenacity of old stories to engage the popular ear. I had supposed even the remembrance of Jacqueline Japha would have been lost in the long silence that has followed that one disobedient act.”
“And so it might, were it not for that closely shut house with the sinister bar across its chief entrance, inviting curiosity while it effectually