“Don’t think I have heard all this from him.  He is tighter than the bark of a tree with regard to his affairs, and I do not think any one in the town knows anything definite about her singing in public, or the asylum; but there is a servant, Peter, who has grown old in the family.  He knows everything, and has told me about my uncle bringing the child home, and how she cried for days for Shaky, a colored man, and slept in the red cloak, and kept it around her in the day-time because he gave it to her.  I have learned that she was never lawfully adopted, and that my uncle has made no will.  Still she must be something to him, but certainly not his lawful child, or why his reticence with regard to her.  I am the only near relative bearing the Crompton name.  I have made myself very necessary to him—­am in fact, in a way, a son of the house.  He is very much broken, and if he dies without a will—­

“Well, all things come to him who waits, and I can afford to wait in such comfortable quarters.  Do you catch on, and call me a scamp with your Puritanical notions?  Not so fast, old fellow.  You have chosen to earn your living delving at the law.  I earn mine by being so useful to my uncle that he will not part with me.  He has already made me a kind of agent to attend to his business, so that I look upon myself as permanently fixed at Crompton House for as long as I choose to stay.  It is a grand old place, with an income of I do not know how many thousands, and if I should ever be fortunate enough to be master, I shall say that for once in his life Howard Crompton was in luck.  I want you to come here, Jack, when you have finished visiting your sister.  I asked my uncle if I could invite you, and he said, ’Certainly; I like to have young people in the house.  It pleases Amy.’

“This is wonderful, as they say he used to keep young people away, almost with lock and key, when she was young.  But now anything which pleases Amy pleases him.

“And now for another matter which involves a girl, Eloise Smith.  Who is she, you ask?  Well, she is neither high born, I fancy, nor city bred; nor much like the girls from Wellesley and Lasell, with whom we used to flirt.  She is a country school-ma’am, and is to be graduated this month in the Normal School in Mayville, where you are visiting.  What is she to me?  Nothing, except this:  She has haunted me ever since I heard of her, and I can’t get rid of an idea that in some way she is to influence my life.  You know I was always given to presentiments and vagaries, and she is the last one.  I might not have thought much of her if my uncle were not in a great way on her account.  Long ago when they changed the name of the town from Troutburg to Crompton in his honor, he built a school-house on his premises, and gave it to the town.  Since then he has felt that he had a right to control it, and say who should teach, and who shouldn’t.  For a long time the people humored him, and made him