A little boy, the colonel’s grandchild, now made his way among the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then, pausing halfway, he began to shriek with terror.  The company drew nearer, and perceived that there was blood on the colonel’s cuff and on his beard, and an unnatural distortion in his fixed stare.  It was too late to render assistance.  The iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man, was dead!  Dead in his new house!

Colonel Pyncheon’s sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise in its day.  There were many rumours, and a great dispute of doctors over the dead body.  But the coroner’s jury sat upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable verdict of “Sudden Death.”

The son and heir came into immediate enjoyment of a considerable estate, but a claim to a large tract of country in Waldo County, Maine, which the colonel, had he lived, would undoubtedly have made good, was lost by his decease.  Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence, and could not be found.  Still, from generation to generation, the Pyncheons cherished an absurd delusion of family importance on the strength of this impalpable claim; and from father to son they clung with tenacity to the ancestral house for the better part of two centuries.

The most noted event in the Pyncheon annals in the last fifty years had been the violent death of the chief member of the family—­an old and wealthy bachelor.  One of his nephews, Clifford, was found guilty of the murder, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.  This had happened thirty years ago, and there were now rumours that the long-buried criminal was about to be released.  Another nephew had become the heir, and was now a judge in an inferior court.  The only members of the family known to be extant, besides the judge and the thirty years’ prisoner, were a sister of the latter, wretchedly poor, who lived in the House of the Seven Gables by the will of the old bachelor, and the judge’s single surviving son, now travelling in Europe.  The last and youngest Pyncheon was a little country girl of seventeen, whose father—­another of the judge’s cousins—­was dead, and whose mother had taken another husband.

II.—­The House without Sunshine

Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was reduced to the business of setting up a pretty shop, and that in the Pyncheon house where she had spent all her days.  After sixty years of idleness and seclusion, she must earn her bread or starve, and to keep shop was the only resource open to her.

The first customer to cross the threshold was a young man to whom old Hepzibah let certain remote rooms in the House of the Seven Gables.  He explained that he had looked in to offer his best wishes, and to see if he could give any assistance.

Poor Hepzibah, when she heard the kindly tone of his voice, began to sob.