IT was only an old deserted house, perched half-way up the hillside and overlooking the village. But it was none the less the village theatre: the peep-hole through which the villagers obtained a glimpse of many mysteries, and the stage and drop-scene of half the legends of the thorp.

It was an old stone building which evidently had once been a dwelling of importance, but for quite a century it had been tenantless and almost entirely dismantled: the home of the owl and the lizard, of the spectre and the bat.

When the sunrise splashed across the fragmentary panes of glass that here and there remained in their frames, the farmer would stand still at his ploughing on the hill-slope and glance up at the great Argus-eyed building that had now, however, more sockets than eyes and a world of memories, of legends and superstitions, would buzz, with strange bewilderment, through his brain.

The old house reminded him of his mother and of his grandfather, and of those who had been the village historians for his childhood, and a musing gravity seemed to deepen in his mind. He was aware of the brevity of life, and of the lapse of the personality; of the tragedies of passion, with their gravity and poignancy, and of the mystery that broods at the back of all our thoughts. But most of all he was aware that the building standing fronting him was the very kernel of his individuality projected into visibility: the one knot into which all his memories were tied.

He would hold his children spell-bound by the hour as he told them the ordinary folk-tales of the hamlet, with that ruin on the hillside as the stage for the majority of them; till his daughter Ruth, who was young and sentimental, though with a streak of passion running through her nature, learned to contemplate the ruin with an awe akin to his, and stared up wonderingly at it, so long and so often, that at last it had become for her a necessary part of life.

While Ruth was still a child, the haunted ruin chiefly attracted her thoughts as the scene and locality of uncanny occurrences that were fanciful and unusual rather than sombre or suggestive. It was the great haunted cheese in which the piskies burrowed, and out of which they hopped with amusing unexpectedness: it was the building to pass which you must always turn your stocking, if you wished to escape being pisky-ledden, or misguided: it was the place to which the “Little Folks" conveyed stolen children: above all, it was the place of dark and cobwebbed corners, where naughty children were put to live with snails and spiders and with great big goggle-eyed buccaboos!

As she stood on her doorstep with her bit of knitting in her hand a tiny doll’s stocking, or a garter for herself little Ruth would stare up at the great black building, with the scarlet splendour of the sunset at its back, until she almost fancied she could see the little winking piskies grinning through the window-holes and clambering across the roofs.

And by-and-by, when the rich yellow sky began to darken and the flocks of rooks flew cawing overhead, Ruth would shiver with a delicious sense of security as she stood beneath the porch in the gathering twilight and heard the wind begin to moan and sigh mysteriously, as if it trembled at the thought of spending the night on the hillside with no other company than that “whisht owld house.”

As she grew older and became aware of the drift of her wishes, feeling stirrings and promptings at the roots of her life, her imagination seized now on the passionate human tragedies which, according to the legends, had been enacted in the building. She had a sweetheart of her own, and she could understand lovers; and something of the glamour and mystery of a great heady passion she believed she could interpret out of her own ripened life.

But Rastus Dabb, her sweetheart, was as cloddish and unimaginative as the heavy-uddered cows, with their great fleshy dewlaps, of which he was prouder than he was of anything else in his world. It was quite impossible to get his feet off the solid earth: and apparently his mind was anchored firmly to his feet. But Ruth had the attractiveness of all young things she was fresh and cheerful, with a heart as light as a feather and, by the law of contrast, she suited him to a nicety, more especially as she was an excellent little housewife to boot. So the courting prospered sunnily; and he let her “romance” as she pleased.

When she was a wife and mother, Ruth presently became acquainted with that grim Shadow who knows the secret of our tears their source and the bitter in them and knows, too, the secret of everlasting peace. And thereafter, when at intervals his wings darkened the world for her, her thoughts went out, with a strange yearning, towards the dead who had once inhabited the ruin and could now roam through it only as ghosts.

“Shall I one day have only such a foothold as theirs in this dear green world of ours?” she would ask herself, shiveringly. And the Sunday-evening’s sermon could soothe her not a whit.

At last, in the waning afternoon of life, when her smooth brown hair was as yet unstreaked with grey and her cheeks had still a splash of colour in them, she fell ill of some mysterious malady mysterious, at least, to the sympathetic villagers and one dreary day in the blustering autumn she was aware in her heart that the Shadow was in the room.

“Draw back the curtains as far as you can,” said she to Rastus, who stood helpless by the bedside.

And when they were drawn, and she could see the great gaunt ruin frowning blackly above the slopes of the shadow-checkered hillside, she cried out suddenly, “I’m going there among them, Rastus! Oh, dear, hold me!” And with that she passed.