Was there any explanation for this strangely self-centred life?  Those who knew him best seemed to think so.  In the first place he had sprung from an unfortunate stock.  Events of unusual and tragic nature had marked the family of both parents.  Nor had his parents themselves been exempt from this seeming fatality.  Antagonistic in tastes and temperament, they had dragged on an unhappy existence in the old home, till both natures rebelled, and a separation ensued which not only disunited their lives but sent them to opposite sides of the globe never to return again, At least, that was the inference drawn from the peculiar circumstances attending the event.  On the morning of one never-to-be-forgotten day, John Van Broecklyn, the grandfather of the present representative of the family, found the following note from his son lying on the library table: 

“Father: 

“Life in this house, or any house, with her is no longer endurable.  One of us must go.  The mother should not be separated from her child.  Therefore it is I whom you will never see again.  Forget me, but be considerate of her and the boy.

“William.”

Six hours later another note was found, this time from the wife: 

“Father: 

“Tied to a rotting corpse what does one do?  Lop off one’s arm if necessary to rid one of the contact.  As all love between your son and myself is dead, I can no longer live within the sound of his voice.  As this is his home, he is the one to remain in it.  May our child reap the benefit of his mother’s loss and his father’s affection.

“Rhoda.”

Both were gone, and gone forever.  Simultaneous in their departure, they preserved each his own silence and sent no word back.  If the one went east and the other west, they may have met on the other side of the globe, but never again in the home which sheltered their boy.  For him and for his grandfather they had sunk from sight in the great sea of humanity, leaving them stranded on an isolated and mournful shore.  The grand-father steeled himself to the double loss, for the child’s sake; but the boy of eleven succumbed.  Few of the world’s great sufferers, of whatever age or condition, have mourned as this child mourned, or shown the effects of his grief so deeply or so long.  Not till he had passed his majority did the line, carved in one day in his baby forehead, lose any of its intensity; and there are those who declare that even later than that, the midnight stillness of the house was disturbed from time to time by his muffled shriek of “Mother!  Mother!”, sending the servants from the house, and adding one more horror to the many which clung about this accursed mansion.

Of this cry Violet had heard, and it was that and the door—­But I have already told you about the door which she was still looking for, when her two companions suddenly halted, and she found herself on the threshold of the library, in full view of Mr. Van Broecklyn and his two guests.