Within the next few days, I remember, I heard the great news buzzing everywhere I went.  We had conjectured that the barn was being refitted for the family of a caretaker, and it was Mary Starkweather herself, our sole dependable representative of the Rich, who was moving in!  Mary Starkweather, who had her house in town, and her home in the country, and her automobiles, and her servants, and her pictures, and her books, to say nothing of her husband and her children and her children’s maid going to live in her barn!  I leave it to you if there was not a valid reason for our commotion.

It must have been two weeks later that I went to town by the upper hill road in order to pass the Starkweather place.  It is a fine old estate, the buildings, except the barn, set well back from the road with a spacious garden near them, and pleasant fields stretching away on every hand.  As I skirted the shoulder of the hill I looked eagerly for the first glimpse of the barn.  I confess that I had woven a thousand stories to explain the mystery, and had reached the point where I could no longer resist seeing if I could solve it.

Well, the barn was transformed.  Two or three new windows, a door with a little porch, a lattice or so for vines, a gable upon the roof lifting an inquiring eyebrow—­and what was once a barn had become a charming cottage.  It seemed curiously to have come alive, to have acquired a personality of its own.  A corner of the great garden had been cut off and included in the miniature grounds of the cottage; and a simple arbour had been built against a background of wonderful beech trees.  You felt at once a kind of fondness for it.

I saw Mary Starkweather in her garden, in a large straw hat, with a trowel in her hand.

“How are you, David Grayson?” she called out when I stopped.

“I have been planning for several days,” I said, “to happen casually by your new house.”

“Have you?”

“You don’t know how you have stirred our curiosity.  We haven’t had a good night’s rest since you moved in.”

“I’ve no doubt of it,” she laughed.  “Won’t you come in?  I’d like to tell you all about it.”

“I also prepared to make excuses for not stopping,” I said, “and thought up various kinds of urgent business, such as buying a new snow shovel to use next winter, but after making these excuses I intended to stop—­if I were sufficiently urged.”

“You are more than urged:  you are commanded.”

As I followed her up the walk she said earnestly: 

“Will you do me a favour?  When you come in will you tell me the first impression my living-room gives you?  No second thoughts.  Tell me instantly.”

“I’ll do it.”  I said, my mind leaping eagerly to all manner of mysterious surprises.

At the centre of the room she turned toward me and with a sweeping backward motion of the arms, made me a bow—­a strong figure instinct with confident grace:  a touch of gray in the hair, a fleeting look of old sadness about the eyes.