Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/185

 completely furnished, though very probably in sad need of a dusting. On the other hand, the large house had been denuded of most of its furniture many years before. The caretaker had stayed on in the lodge until last year, after Peter Pomeroy’s death. There was another cottage on the property which Peter Pomeroy and his daughter had sometimes used, but this had fallen of late years into complete disrepair, and there was no furniture of any kind in it now. During the last year or two of the old man’s life he and his daughter had lived in the caretaker’s lodge on their infrequent visits to Virginia.

The wayfarers stood for a moment on the last ridge that divided the Pomeroy land from the rest of Virginia. On the crest of that ridge her slight figure outlined against the sky, bonnet in her hand, her light hair blowing back from her forehead, Jessica was a modern mænad gazing upon her homeland. They stood there for a space in silence. Below them was the rude brown oval of the private racetrack that Pomeroy had built. At the far end stood the gaunt, bare house that had, in the years long past, been the only home she knew, and at the near end was the small, neat looking house where the caretaker had lived and where she now proposed to make her home for awhile [sic].

In the distance were the hills, nebulous in a purple haze of midday sunlight, shimmering in red and blue and gold under the brush wielded miraculously by Autumn, and near the lodge glistened the playing waters of a live brook.

“It’s like coming home from a far country, Elizabeth,” she said at last. “No matter where you go, Elizabeth, there’s a thrill about coming home that⸺”

“I wonder if the plumbing still works,” grumbled the