“Yes, I’ll come again,” Stephen answered, and he knew that he should.  Whether he willed it or not he would be drawn back by the Governor’s irresistible influence.  The man had aroused in him an intense, a devouring curiosity.  He wanted to know his thoughts and his life, the mystery of his birth, of his upbringing, of his privations and denials.  Above all he wanted to know why he had succeeded, what peculiar gift had brought him out of obscurity, and had given him the ability to use men and circumstances as if they were tools in his hands.

When the young man ran down the steps there was a pleasant excitement tingling in his veins, as if he were feeling the glow of forbidden wine.  Turning beside the fountain, he glanced back as the Governor was closing the door, and in his vision of the lighted interior he saw Patty Vetch darting airily across the hall.  So it was nothing more than a hoax!  She hadn’t hurt herself in the least.  She had merely made a laughing-stock of him for the amusement doubtless of her obscure acquaintances!  For an instant anger held him motionless; then turning quickly he walked rapidly past the fountain to the open gate.

The snow was dimly lighted on the long slope to the library; and straight ahead, in the circle beneath the statue of Washington, the bronze silhouette of a great Virginian stood sharply cut against the luminous haze of the street.  From the chimney-stack of a factory near the river a wreath of gray smoke was flung over the tree-tops, where it broke and drifted in feathery garlands.  Across the road a group of three trees was delicately etched, with each separate branch and twig, on the slate-coloured evening sky.

He had passed through the gate when a voice speaking suddenly at his side caused him to start and stop short in his walk.  A moment before he had fancied himself alone; he had heard no footsteps; and the place from where the words came was a mere vague blur in the shadows.  There was something uncanny in the muffled approach, and the sensation it produced on his nerves was like the shock he used to feel as a child when his hand was unexpectedly touched in the dark.

“I beg your pardon,” he said to the vague shape at the foot of a tree.  “Did you speak to me?”

The shadows divided, and what seemed to him the edge of darkness moved forward into the dimly lighted space at his side.  He saw now that it was the figure of a woman in a long black cloak, with the dilapidated remains of a mourning veil hanging from her small bonnet.  As she came toward him he was stirred first by an impulse of pity and immediately afterward by a violent repulsion.  In her whole figure there were the tragic signs of poverty and desperation; but it was the horror of her eyes, he told himself, that he should never forget.  They were eyes that would haunt his sleep that night like the face of the drowned man in the nursery rhyme.

“Will you tell me,” asked the woman hurriedly, “who lives in this house?”