Two or three days passed, and we had entirely forgotten Ida’s erratic admirer, when Gabrielle returned from a morning walk with the information that an intoxicated man was sitting upon the steps of the side-hill house.  She met mamma and Ida starting for a little stroll, and communicated this unpleasant news to them.  Mamma, however, is not timid, and she walked on with Ida, determined to view the invader from afar, and then summon Bernard to dismiss him.

A figure was sitting, as Gabrielle said, upon the piazza of the new house, but was so motionless that Ida exclaimed laughingly: 

“It is a scarecrow placed there by some one in retaliation for our notice to trespassers to keep off the grounds.”

As they passed it, however, the scarecrow slowly lifted its head and addressed them with: 

“Is this Mr. Greeley’s place?”

“Yes,” said mamma.

“And is this young lady Miss Ida?”

“Yes.”

“You have received, I believe, a few letters from me, Miss Ida:  my name is Hudson.”

Fortunately our family are not of a fainting disposition, for a tete-a-tete with a lunatic was a situation requiring some nerve and perfect self-control; so, although mamma and Ida were much alarmed upon learning the name of their visitor, they neither screamed nor fainted, and mamma invited him quite courteously to walk up to the house.

Mr. Hudson was a tall, powerful man, with cunning, restless, gray eyes, was well dressed, and wore a linen duster.  He had come, he said, seven hundred miles to see Ida.  Upon reaching the house, he followed mamma into the dining-room where Marguerite, Gabrielle, and I were sitting at work.

“Ah, Miss Gabrielle!” he said, “I supposed you were at school.”

One or two other rational remarks of the sort, and mamma’s perfect sang-froid so deceived me that I decided the supposed lunatic must be perfectly sane.  In a moment, however, he looked somewhat uneasy, and said: 

“I have a long story to tell your niece, ma’am, but I feel a little bashful about speaking before so many young ladies.”

“Would you like to see me alone, then?” said mamma promptly; “you would not object to telling your story to a married woman.”

Then signing to us to leave the room, she followed us to the door, and breathing rather than whispering, “Run for Bernard,” returned.

It appears that the man grew more excitable when alone with mamma, and the story he told her was not a cheerful one to hear.

“It began,” he said, “five years ago, by my father cutting his throat with a razor.  They say he was crazy, and,” with a fiendish chuckle, “some people say I am crazy too.”

“Indeed!” said mamma, sympathetically, “how sad!”

“This we may call the first scene in the story,” he added, although what connection there was between suicide and his proposed marriage with Ida, poor mamma could not imagine.