“This second Richard became in time a highly successful physician, a man honored and beloved by this community.  There was no wildness in him, nor in his son, the third Richard.  His granddaughter Sarah Hynds married Professor Doctor Max Jelnik, the celebrated Viennese alienist, whom she met abroad.  Your next-door neighbor is Sarah’s son, born somewhere in Hungary, I believe.  Both the young man’s parents are dead, and I understand he has led a vagrant and irresponsible life, preferring to rove about rather than follow his father’s profession, to which he was educated.

“My late client, indeed, held that he had inherited the deplorable characteristics of the first Richard.  She asserted—­she allowed herself great freedom of speech—­that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  It displeased her that he should come to Hyndsville.  She thought it showed a malignant nature and a peculiar shamelessness that he chose to reside next door to Hynds House, from which his great-great-grandfather had been so ignominously driven.  Her first meeting with the young man bred in her an ineradicable dislike.”

Now what really happened is this:  The fences having been neglected, and in consequence fallen down, and the hedge broken in many places, Mr. Jelnik, just come to Hyndsville, thoughtlessly and perhaps ignorantly crossed the sacred Scarlett boundaries.  Up-stairs behind her blind, like an ancient spider in her web, the old lady spied him.  She flung open the window and leaned out.

“Who are you that prowl about other peoples’ yards like a thievish cat?” she demanded peremptorily.

The young man looked up, uncovering his beautiful head.

“I am Nicholas Jelnik.  And I pray your pardon, Madame:  I did not mean to intrude,” and he made as if to go.

“Jelnik!” said she, in a hoarse and croaking voice.  “Jelnik!  Aha!  I know your breed!  I smell the blood in you—­bad blood! rotten bad blood!  You’ve a bad face, young man:  a scoundrelly face, the face of a fellow whose grandfather robbed his house and shamed his name!  And why have you come near Hynds House, at this hour of the day?  He, he, he! I know, I know!”

Lost in astonishment, Jelnik remained staring up at her.  The apparition of this venerable vixen, who had hated Richard’s son and now hated him of a later generation, who had seen those that had talked to Richard himself in his ill-fated lifetime, so stirred his imagination that it deprived him of utterance.  All he could do was to stand still and stare and stare and stare.  He had never seen anybody so old—­she was nearly a hundred, and looked a thousand—­and he stared at the old, old, wrinkled, yellow face, the unhuman face, in which the beady black eyes burned with wicked fire; at the nearly bald head, thinly covered with a floating wisp or so of wool-like white hair; at the claw-like, shriveled, yellow hands, the stringy neck, the whole sexless meager wreck of what had been a woman.  It was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human pity, and young disgust.  She raised her voice: