Ill luck had often seemed to dog the footsteps of his house and even his journey home was not without a mishap; nothing serious, as things turned out, but still something that might have been vastly so.  His train was in a wreck, rather a nasty one, but Nigel himself had come out unscathed, and much to be congratulated, he thought, since through that wreck he has become acquainted with what he firmly believed to be the most beautiful girl in the world.  Better yet, he had learned that she was a neighbour of his at Merriton Towers.  That fact helped him through what he felt was going to be somewhat of an ordeal—­his entrance into the gloomy and ghost-ridden old house of his inheritance.

CHAPTER II

THE FROZEN FLAMES

Merriton Towers had been called the loneliest spot in England by many of the tourists who chanced to visit the Fen district, and it was no misnomer.  Nigel, having seen it some thirteen years before, found that his memory had dimmed the true vision of the place considerably; that where he had builded romance, romance was not.  Where he had softened harsh outlines, and peopled dark corridors with his own fancies, those same outlines had taken on a grimness that he could hardly believe possible, and the long, dark corridors of his mind’s vision were longer and darker and lonelier than he had ever imagined any spot could be.

It was a handsome place, no doubt, in its gaunt, gray, prisonlike way.  And, too, it had a moat and a miniature portcullis that rather tickled his boyish fancy.  The furnishings, however, had an appalling grimness that took the very heart out of one.  Chairs which seemed to have grown in their places for centuries crowded the corners of hallway and stairs like gigantic nightmares of their original prototypes.  Monstrous curtains of red brocade, grown purple with the years, seemed to hang from every window and door crowding out the light and air.  The carpets were thick and dark and had lost all sign of pattern in the dull gloom of the centuries.

It was, in fact, a house that would create ghosts.  The atmosphere was alive with that strange sensation of disembodied spirits which some very old houses seem to possess.  Narrow, slit-like windows in perfect keeping with the architecture and the needs of the period in which it was built—­if not with modern ideas of hygiene and health—­kept the rooms dark and musty.  When Nigel first entered the place through the great front door thrown open by the solemn-faced butler, who he learned had been kept on from his uncle’s time, he felt as though he were entering his own tomb.  When the door shut he shuddered as the light and sunshine vanished.

The first night he hardly slept a wink.  His bed was a huge four-poster, girt about with plush hangings like over-ripe plums, that shut him in as though he were in some monstrous Victorian trinket box.  A post creaked at every turn he made in its downy softnesses, and being used to the light, camp-like furniture of an Indian bungalow he got up, took an eiderdown with him, and spent the rest of the hours upon a sofa drawn up beside an open window.