So still it looked with its closed shutters, that what slight evidence there was of its really being inhabited appeared only to make it yet more strange and alone; for these were a gaunt, feeble, old dog, who paced up and down the flags as if keeping guard, and a brass handle on the oaken door, which was so highly polished that it glittered and shone in the light.

But there was a great deal of life and company up aloft, for a tribe of blue pigeons had their home among those eaves and chimneys, and they walked daintily up the steep roof with their small red feet while they uttered their plaintive call to their young.

It was a strange fancy that prompted the cleaning of this door-handle.  “I mun keep it bright,” the old woman would say who did it, “in case anybody should come to call.”  No one but herself ever opened the door, nobody within cared that she should bestow this trouble.  Nobody, for more than fifty years, ever had “come to call,” and yet, partly because the feigning of such a possibility seemed to connect her still with her fellows of the work-a-day world, and partly because the young master, her foster-brother, whom she deeply loved, had last been seen by her with this door-handle in his hand, she faithfully continued every day to begin her light tasks by rubbing it, and while so doing she would often call to mind the early spring twilight she had opened her eyes in so long ago, and heard creaking footsteps passing down the stairs; and then how she had heard the great bolt of the door withdrawn, and had sprung out of bed, and peering through her casement had seen him close it after him, and with his young brother steal away among the ghostly white pear-trees, never to return.

“And I didn’t give it a thought that they could be after aught worse than rook-shooting,” she would murmur, “for all I heard a sort of a sobbing on the stairs.  It was hard on poor old Madam though, never to take any leave of her; but all her life has been hard for that matter, poor innocent old critter.  Well, well, I hope it’s not a sin to wish ’em happy, spite of that bad action; and as for her, she’s had her troubles in this world, as all the parish is ready to testify, and no doubt but what that will be considered to her in the world to come.”

All the parish was always ready to testify that poor old Madam had had a sight o’ troubles.  All the parish took a certain awful pleasure in relating them; it was a sort of distinction to have among them such an unfortunate woman and mother, so that the very shepherds’ and ditchers’ wives plumed themselves upon it over those in the next parish, where the old Squire and his wife had never lost one of their many children, or had any trouble “to speak of.”  “For there was no call to count his eldest son’s running off with a dairymaid, it being well beknown,” they would observe with severity, “that his mother never would let e’er a one of the young madams as were suitable to marry him come nigh the house.”