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to have been out for some time. The autumn wind rattled the great French windows and flung out the muslin curtains which Nessie had put up. Yet with all its draughtiness, the odour of infants, which careless hill mothers allow, permeated the air. Three drying diapers hung on chairs before a great fireplace in which a log smouldered. As an ironic touch, the capstone of the fireplace was carved with an old coat of arms which must have belonged to Abner Teeftallow—the coat of arms, the unfragrant cloths of the baby, an unmade bed, a hearthstone scattered with ashes and bits of kindling. . . .

Belshue went through an adjoining room which once had been a legal library. All left of it now were some private acts of the Tennessee legislature; two volumes of Blackstone; an early copy of Kent—books which had daunted the eloquence of the auctioneer who had gutted the old judge's library. Cheek by jowl with them in their walnut shelves were towels, napkins, hammers, wrenches, buckles, brads, harness, dried peppers, cured onions, a tuft of mullein to make medicinal tea, gourds of seeds from flourishing gardens; a kind of illiterate hoi polloi elbowing the last remnants of the old aristocracy of law books.

The jeweller went through one deserted room after another with a growing fear in his heart, when finally he passed out of the dining room along a covered brick walk about twenty feet long to the detached kitchen. In this dark room he heard a rattling and entered, expecting to see Lizzie, the Negro cook. Instead he saw Nessie herself bending over the stove besmudged with pots. Belshue looked at his wife in surprise.

"Where's Lizzie?"

Nessie answered, with a long breath, "She was afraid to stay here—I don't mind doing this."

"Afraid to stay here, why?"

"The neighbours have been talking to her."

Belshue felt an impulse to ask angrily, "What did they say?" but he hesitated for fear it would bring up the old