Sally was silent.  Even her buoyant hopes fell before the indisputable evidence given by her eyes.  It was so big—­the old place!  A small house one might hope to repair, but a large building like this—­it would cost more than they would have to spare in years.  If the outside were any indication of the inside, the situation was hopeless.

She followed Alec in through the gateway, at the dilapidated stone side-posts of which Max gave a significant wave of the hand as he passed.  An overgrown hedge ran along the entire front of the place, its untrimmed wildness adding to the general unkempt look, as did the sodden, tangled surface of what had once been a lawn, the rank bunches of shrubbery which half hid the front windows from sight, and the broken bricks in the old walk which led, beside a grass-grown driveway, from gate-post to porch.

“How did Maxwell ever come to let this place go to seed like this?” lamented Uncle Timothy.  “He must have cared nothing at all for it.  One would think it was forty years instead of only ten that it had been left to wind and weather.”

“It’s a wonder that some passing tramp hasn’t set fire to it,” commented Max, searching in his pocket for the key which had been delivered to him by Mr. Sidway, his uncle’s executor.  “Take a long breath before I let you in.  It’ll be musty and fusty enough to stifle you, probably.”

With considerable difficulty he turned the key in the rusty lock and opened the door, which turned creakingly upon its long unused hinges.  But with the first step inside Sally’s drooping spirits leaped up again.

“Oh Max,” she cried, “what a beautiful old hall!”

“Beautiful, is it?” inquired Max, laughing contemptuously.  “Well, I can’t say I see it.”

“Looks just like a barracks to me!” sniffed Alec.  “Phew-w—­what air—­or lack of it!”

“But it is beautiful,” persisted Sally, in genuine enthusiasm.  “See how wide and high, sweeping straight through to that door at the back.  And see the wide, low staircase with the spindle railing and the curved posts at the bottom.  See the carving over the doors—­and the fanlight over the outside ones.  And look at that fireplace!”

She dragged Max by one arm and Uncle Timothy by the other, to stand in front of it.  Halfway down the hall, sharing one of the great chimneys with another fireplace on the other side of the wall, was a chimney-piece of fine old colonial design.  The proportions were colossal.

“It would take a cord of wood to keep the thing going an evening,” asserted Max.

“And then nobody’d be warm unless he was sitting with his head inside the hood,” supplemented Alec.

But Sally was already off upon explorations.  She rushed into the room upon the left of the hall; it was a drawing-room thirty feet long by twenty wide.  She darted into the room on the right—­it was twenty feet square, and back of it lay another of similar size.  She could no longer wait for her party, with their slow and indifferent following of her, but ran from room to room, calling back injunctions to note special points of interest.