Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/205

 discovered that they had been walking for several hours; that day was almost over. At this time they were near the bare old Pomeroy house.

“That’s the old house—where nobody lives, isn’t it?” asked Val.

She nodded. “They say it’s haunted,” she said.

“That’s fine,” he replied. Why not a haunted house, along with all the other paraphernalia of mystery—the investiture of romance. “That’s bully,” he said again. They regarded it closely from where they stood, and in the dying light they could very easily have brought themselves to the persuasion that beings not of this earth walked the place. Why not?

It was gaunt and bare, with a lone stone chimney that stood up against the dying light like a great skinny finger; there was not a whole pane of glass in the windows—the storms had done their work well; all about it was an air of loneliness, of an aloofness from the world, of a thing which was different, of something that was a connecting link between the past and the present and yet not of either; there was about the house an aura of supernatural things, of knowledge of the shapes that go by night. It was just a tumble down old house that was dying from lack of attention and repair, yet it seemed more than that to the young couple as they stood there in the waning light and regarded it closely.

“You couldn’t get a negro to go as close as this to the place for all the money in the world,” she said.

“I guess many white men wouldn’t care to be hanging around it very much, either,” he added. “Especially at night. I don’t know what it is, there’s something about the old place I know it’s foolish, of course, but ”