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By Root 495 0

the golden whisper of buttercups. She was positively unable to reply to Annetta’s friendly greeting, and Annetta reflected that Nan Blythe was really getting to be a proud and saucy little puss and needed a bit of training in good manners. Pale Mrs Rod Palmer never dreamed that she had poisoned someone and was dying of remorse. Elder Gordon MacAllister of the solemn face, had no notion that a curse had been put on him at birth by a witch, the result being that he could never smile. Dark-moustached Fraser Palmer, of a blameless life, little knew that when Nan Blythe looked at him she was thinking, ‘I believe that man has committed a dark and desperate deed. He looks as if he had some dreadful secret on his conscience.’ And Archibald Fyfe had no suspicion that when Nan Blythe saw him coming she was busy making up a rhyme as a reply to any remark he might make because he was never to be spoken to except in rhyme. He never did speak to her, being exceedingly afraid of children, but Nan got no end of fun out of desperately and quickly inventing a rhyme.

I’m very well, thank you, Mr Fyfe.

How are you yourself and your wife?

or

Yes, it is a very fine day,

Just the right kind for making hay.

There is no knowing what Mrs Morton Kirk would have said if she had been told that Nan Blythe would never come to her house… supposing she had ever been invited… because there was a red footprint on her doorstep, and her sister-in-law, placid, kind, unsought Elizabeth Kirk, did not dream she was an old maid because her lover had dropped dead at the altar just before the wedding ceremony.

It was all very amusing and interesting, and Nan never lost her way between fact and fiction until she became possessed with the Lady of the Mysterious Eyes.

It is no use asking how dreams grow. Nan herself could never have told you how it came about. It started with the GLOOMY HOUSE… Nan saw it always just like that, spelled in capitals. She liked to spin her romances about places as well as people, and the GLOOMY HOUSE was the only place around, except the old Bailey house, which lent itself to romance. Nan had never seen the HOUSE itself… she only knew that it was there, behind a thick, dark spruce wood on the Lowbridge side-road, and had been vacant from time immemorial. So Susan said. Nan didn’t know what time immemorial was, but it was a most fascinating phrase, just suited to gloomy houses.

Nan always ran madly past the lane that led up to the GLOOMY HOUSE when she went along the side-road to visit her chum, Dora Clow. It was a long, dark, tree-arched lane with thick grass growing between its ruts and ferns waist-high under the spruces. There was a long grey maple bough near the tumbledown gate locked exactly like a crooked old arm reaching down to encircle her. Nan never knew when it might reach a wee bit farther and grab her. It gave her such a thrill to escape it.

One day Nan, to her astonishment, heard Susan saying that Thomasine Fair had come to live in GLOOMY HOUSE… or, as Susan unromantically phrased it, the old MacAllister place.

‘She will find it rather lonely I should imagine,’ Mother had said. ‘It’s so out-of-the-way.’

‘She will not mind that,’ said Susan. ‘She never goes anywhere, not even to church. Hasn’t gone anywhere for years… though they say she walks in her garden at night. Well, well, to think what she has come to… her that was so handsome and such a terrible flirt. The hearts she broke in her day! And look at her now! Well, it is a warning and that you may tie to.’

Just to whom it was a warning Susan did not explain and nothing more was said for nobody at Ingleside was very much interested in Thomasine Fair. But Nan, who had grown a little tired of all her old dream lives and was agog for something new, seized on Thomasine Fair in the GLOOMY HOUSE. Bit by bit, day after day, night after night… one could believe anything at night… she built up a legend about her until the whole thing flowered out unrecognizably and became a dearer dream to Nan than any she had hitherto known. Nothing before had ever seemed so entrancing,