“It’s stopped snowing, and you will have clear starlight for your walk home,—­the wind’s gone down, too!” he said, as he opened the hall door.

“Don’t come any farther, General Herbert!” said North.

But the general followed him into the stone arched vestibule.

“It’s a fine night for your walk,—­but you’re quite sure you don’t want to be driven into town?”

“No, no,—­good night.”  And North held out his hand.

“Good night.”

North went down the carriageway, and Herbert reentered the house.

North kept to the beaten path for a little while, then left it and tramped out across the fields until he came to a strip of woodland that grew along a stony hillside.  He followed this ridge back a short distance and presently emerged upon a sloping meadow that overhung a narrow ravine.  Not two hundred yards distant loomed Idle Hour, somber and dark and massive.  He found a stump on the edge of the woods and brushed the snow from it, then drawing his overcoat closely about him, he sat down and lit his pipe.

The windows of Idle Hour still showed their many lights.  At his feet a thread-like stream, swollen by the recent rains, splashed and murmured ceaselessly.  He sat there a long time silent and absorbed, watching the lights, until at last they vanished from the drawing-room and the library.  Then other lights appeared behind curtained windows on the second floor.  These in their turn were extinguished, and Idle Hour sank deeper into the shadows as the crescent moon slipped behind the horizon.

“God bless her!” North said aloud.

He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and retraced his steps to the drive.  He had but turned from this into the public road when he heard the clatter of wheels and the beat of hoofs, and a rapidly driven team swung around a bend in the road in front of him.  He stepped aside to let it pass, but the driver pulled up abreast of him with a loud command to his horses.

“Heard the news?” he asked, leaning out over the dash-board of his buggy.

“What news?” asked North.

“Oh, I guess you haven’t heard!” said the stranger.  “Well, old man McBride, the hardware merchant, is dead!  Murdered!”

“Murdered!” cried North.

“Yes, sir,—­murdered!  They found him in his store this evening a little after six.  No one knows who did it.  Well, good night, I thought maybe you’d like to know.  Awful, ain’t it?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

A GAMBLER AT HOME

It was morning, and Mr. Gilmore sat by his cheerful open fire in that front room of his, where by night were supposed to flourish those games of chance which were such an offense to the “better element” in Mount Hope.  Mr. Gilmore was hardly a person of unexceptional taste, though he had no suspicion of this fact, since he counted that room quite all that any gentleman’s parlor should be.