near the stables to house her Pomeranians and her Siamese cats. For Aunt Cassie could not abide the thought of "the animals dirtying up the house." Even the "retiring room" of the late Mr. Struthers had been converted since his death into a museum, spotless and purified of tobacco and whisky, where his chair sat before his desk, turned away from it a little, as if his spirit were still seated there. On the desk lay his pipe (as he had left it) and the neat piles of paper (carefully dusted each day but otherwise undisturbed) which he had put there with his own hand on the morning they found him seated on the chair, his head fallen back a little, as if asleep. And in the center of the desk lay two handsomely bound volumes—"Cornices of Old Boston Houses" and "Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards"—which he had written in these last sad years when his life seemed slowly to fade from him . . . the years in which Aunt Cassie seemed rapidly to recover the wiry strength and health for which she had been famous as a girl.
The house, people said, had been built by Mr. Struthers in the expectation of a large family, but it had remained great and silent of children's voices as a tomb since the day it was finished, for Aunt Cassie had never been strong until it was too late for her to bear him heirs.
Sabine Callendar had a whole set of theories about the house and about the married life of Aunt Cassie, but they were theories which she kept, in her way, entirely to herself, waiting and watching until she was certain of them. There was a hatred between the two women that was implacable and difficult to define, an emotion almost of savagery which concealed itself beneath polite phrases and casual observations of an acid character. They encountered each other more frequently than Aunt Cassie would have wished, for Sabine, upon her return to Durham, took up Aunt Cassie's habit of going from house to house on foot in search of news and enter-
