It is true.  To me houses are the only fabrications of man’s hands that are personalities.  Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement, but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained against the city’s relentless encroachments.  Once hallowed by habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it!  Ambition, pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely endured—­the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions.  Yes, I love the old houses.  Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed.  It has outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead, unhuman thing.

That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably with the honorable generations of the Worths.  Then it had died.  In one smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it.  Now it stood staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy square.  Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.

The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.

“Yes; you’re old, Dominie.  But you’re not wise.  You’re very foolish.  Foolish and obstinate.”

Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking:  “Why am I foolish and obstinate?”

“Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch.  Don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Then why did Ned commit suicide?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you explain away his written confession?”

“I don’t.  I only know that it was not in Ned Worth’s character willfully to kill an old man.  You were his friend; you ought to know it as well as I do.”

“Ah, that’s different,” said the Little Red Doctor, giving me one of his queer looks.  “Yes; you’re a pig-headed old man, Dominie.”

“I’m a believer in character.”

“I don’t know of any other man equally pig-headed, except possibly one.  He’s old, too.”

“Gale Sheldon,” said I, naming the gentle, withered librarian of a branch library a few blocks to the westward, the only other resident of Our Square who had unfailingly supported me in my loyalty to the memory of the last of the Worths.

“Yes.  He’s waiting for us now in his rooms.  Will you come?”

Perceiving that there was something back of this—­there usually is, in the Little Red Doctor’s maneuvers—­I rose and we set out.  As we passed the Worth house it seemed grimmer and bleaker than ever before.  There was something savage and desperate in its desolation.  The cold curse of abandonment lay upon it.  At the turn of the corner the Little Red Doctor said abruptly.

“She’s dead.”

“Who?” I demanded.

“The girl.  The woman in the case.”