“Will you forgive me for saying that you are so exactly the person I should like to see in the house that I feel I can not give you up?  So strongly do I feel this that I would, if I dared, enclose your check and beg you to use the house rent free.  Faithfully yours, Emily Benton.”

Gracefully worded and carefully written as the letter was, I seemed to feel behind it some stress of feeling, an excitement perhaps, totally out of proportion to its contents.  Years before I had met Miss Emily, even then a frail little old lady, her small figure stiffly erect, her eyes cold, her whole bearing one of reserve.  The Bentons, for all their open doors, were known in that part of the country as “proud.”  I can remember, too, how when I was a young girl my mother had regarded the rare invitations to have tea and tiny cakes in the Benton parlor as commands, no less, and had taken the long carriage-ride from the city with complacency.  And now Miss Emily, last of the family, had begged me to take the house.

In the end, as has been shown, I agreed.  The glamor of the past had perhaps something to do with it.  But I have come to a time of life when, failing intimate interests of my own, my neighbors’ interests are mine by adoption.  To be frank, I came because I was curious.  Why, aside from a money consideration, was the Benton house to be occupied by an alien household?  It was opposed to every tradition of the family as I had heard of it.

I knew something of the family history:  the Reverend Thaddeus Benton, rector of Saint Bartholomew, who had forsaken the frame rectory near the church to build himself the substantial home now being offered me; Miss Emily, his daughter, who must now, I computed, be nearly seventy; and a son whom I recalled faintly as hardly bearing out the Benton traditions of solidity and rectitude.

The Reverend Mr. Benton, I recalled, had taken the stand that his house was his own, and having moved his family into it, had thereafter, save on great occasions, received the congregation individually or en masse, in his study at the church.  A patriarchal old man, benevolent yet austere, who once, according to a story I had heard in my girlhood, had horsewhipped one of his vestrymen for trifling with the affections of a young married woman in the village!

There was a gap of thirty years in my knowledge of the family.  I had, indeed, forgotten its very existence, when by the chance of a newspaper advertisement I found myself involved vitally in its affairs, playing providence, indeed, and both fearing and hating my role.  Looking back, there are a number of things that appear rather curious.  Why, for instance, did Maggie, my old servant, develop such a dislike for the place?  It had nothing to do with the house.  She had not seen it when she first refused to go.  But her reluctance was evident from the beginning.

“I’ve just got a feeling about it, Miss Agnes,” she said.  “I can’t explain it, any more than I can explain a cold in the head.  But it’s there.”