Arthur; don't feel so badly. It is terrible to see a man cry as you are crying.'
'No, no; let me cry,' Arthur replied. 'The tears do me good, and my brain would burst without them. It is all on fire, and my head is aching so hard again.'
At this moment Charles appeared, asking if his master would have dinner served. But Arthur could not eat, and the table which had been arranged with so much care for Gretchen was cleared away, while Gretchen's chair was moved back from the fire and Gretchen's footstool put in its place, and nothing remained to show that she had been expected except the pretty dress, with its accessories, which lay upon Arthur's bed. These he took care of himself, folding them with trembling hands and tear-wet eyes, as a fond mother folds the clothes her dead child has worn, sorrowing most over the half-worn shoes, so like the dear little feet which will never wear them again. So Arthur sorrowed over the high-heeled slippers, with the blue rosettes and pointed toes, fashionable in Paris at that time. Gretchen had never worn them, it is true, but they seemed so much like her that his tears fell fast as he held them in his hands, and, dropping upon the pure white satin, left a stain upon it.
When everything was put away and the long trunk locked again, Arthur went back to the couch and said to his brother, who was still in the room:
'Don't leave me, Frank; at least not yet, till I am more composed. My nerves are dreadfully shaken to-night, and I feel afraid of something, I don't know what. How the wind howls and moans! I never heard it like that but once before, and that was years ago, among the Alps in Switzerland. Then it blew off the roof of the chalet where I was staying, and I heard afterward that Amy died that night. You remember Amy, the girl I loved so well, though not as I love Gretchen. If she had come, I should have told you all about her, but now it does not matter who she is, or where I saw her first, knitting in the sunshine, with the halo on her hair and the blue of the summer skies reflected in her eyes. Oh, Gretchen, my love, my love!'
He was talking more to himself than to Frank, who sat beside him until far into the night, while the wild storm raged on and shook the solid house to its very foundations. A tall tree in the yard was uprooted, and a chimney-top came crushing down with a force which threatened to break through the roof. For a moment there was a lull in the tempest, and, raising himself upon his elbow, Arthur listened intently, while he said, in a whisper which made Frank's blood curdle in his veins:
'Hark! there's more abroad to-night than the storm! Something is happening or has happened which affects me. I have heard voices in the wind—Gretchen calling me from far away. Frank, Frank, did you hear that? It was a woman's cry; her voice—Gretchen's. Yes, Gretchen, I am coming!'
And with a bound he was at the window, which he opened wide, and leaning far out of it, listened to hear repeated a sound which Frank, too, had heard—a cry like the voice of one in mortal peril calling for help.
It might have been the wind, which on the instant swept round the corner in a great gust, driving the snow and sleet into Arthur's face, and making him draw in his body, nearly half of which was leaning from the window as he waited for the strange cry to be repeated. But it did not come again, though Frank, whose nerves were strung to almost as high a tension as his brother's, thought he heard it once above the roar of the tempest, and a vague feeling of disquiet took possession of him as he sat for an hour longer watching his brother and listening to the noise without.
Gradually the storm subsided, and when the clock struck one the wind had gone down, the snow had ceased to fall, and the moon was struggling feebly through a rift of dark clouds in the west. After persuading his brother to go to bed, Frank retired to his own room and was soon asleep, unmindful of the tragedy which was being enacted not very far away, where a little child was smiling in its dreams, while the woman beside it was praying for life until her mission should be accomplished.
CHAPTER XII.
THE TRAMP HOUSE.
About midway between the entrance to the park and the Collingwood grounds, and fifty rods or more from the cross-road which the strange woman had taken on the night of the storm, stood a small stone building, which had been used as a school-house until the Shannondale turnpike was built and the cross-road abandoned. After that it was occupied by one poor family after another, until the property of which it was a part came into the hands of the elder Mr. Tracy, who, with his English ideas, thought to make it a lodge and bring the gates of his park down to it. But this he did not do, and the house was left to the mercy of the winds, and the storms, and the boys, until Arthur became master there, and with his artistic taste thought to beautify it a little and turn it to some use.
'I would tear it down,' he said to his neighbor, Mr. St. Claire, who stood with him one day looking at it, 'I would tear it down, and have once or twice given orders to that effect, but as often countermanded them. I do not know that I am exactly superstitious, but I am subject to fancies, or presentiments, or whatever you choose to call those moods which take possession of you and which you cannot shake off, and, singularly enough, one of these fancies is connected with this old hut, and as often as I decide to remove it something tells me not to; and once I actually dreamed that a dead woman's hand clutched me by the arm and bade me leave it alone. A case of "Woodman spare that tree," you see.'
And Arthur laughed lightly at his own morbid fancies, but he left the house and planted around it quantities of woodbine, which soon crept up its sides to the chimney-top and made it look like the ivy-covered cottages so common in Ireland. It was the nicest kind of rendezvous for lovers, who frequently availed themselves of its seclusion to whisper their secrets to each other, and it was sometimes used as a dining-room by the people of Shannondale, where in summer they held picnics in the pretty pine grove not far away. But during Arthur's absence it had been suffered to go to decay, for Frank cared little for lovers or picnics, and less for the tramps who often slept there at night, and for whom it came at last to be called the Tramp House. So the winds, and the storms, and the boys did their work upon it unmolested, and when Arthur returned, the door hung upon one hinge, and there was scarcely a whole light of glass in the six windows.
'Better tear the old rookery down. It is of no earthly use except to harbor rats and tramps. I've known two or three to spend the night in it at a time, and once a lot of gipsies quartered themselves here for a week and nearly scared Dolly to death,' Frank said to his brother as they were walking past it a few days after his return, and Arthur was commenting upon its dilapidated appearance.
'Oh, the tramps sleep here, do they?' Arthur said. 'Well, let them. If any poor, homeless wretches want to stay here nights they are very welcome, I am sure, and I will see that the door is rehung and glass put in the windows. May as well make them comfortable.'
'Do as you like,' Frank replied, and there, so far as he was concerned, the matter ended.
But while the carpenters were at work at the Park Arthur sent one of them to the old stone house and had the door fixed and glass put in two of the windows, while rude but close shutters were nailed before the others, and then Arthur went himself into the room and pushed a long table which the picnic people had used for their refreshments and the tramps for a bed into a corner, where one sleeping upon it would be more sheltered from the draught. All this seemed nonsense to Frank, who laughingly suggested that Arthur should place in it a stove and a ton of coal for the benefit of his lodgers. But Arthur cared little for his brother's jokes. His natural kindness of heart, which was always seeking another's good, had prompted him to this care for the Tramp House, in which he felt a strange
