A moment, and we were
inside, the chauffeur spinning away to the garage.
Usually I am newly delighted every night with my quaint old house and
its small, but pretty garden, to which it seems delightful to come home
after hours of hard work at the theatre. But to-night, though a cheerful
light shone out from between the drawn curtains of the salon, the place
looked inexpressibly dreary, even forbidding, to me. I felt that I hated
the house, though I had chosen it after a long search for peacefulness
and privacy. How gloomy, how dead, was the street beyond the high wall,
with all its windows closed like the eyes of corpses. There was a moist,
depressing smell of earth after long-continued rains, in the garden. No
wonder the place had been to let at a bargain, for a long term! There
had been a murder in it once, and it had stood empty for twelve or
thirteen of the fifteen years since the almost forgotten tragedy. I had
been the tenant for two years now--before I became a "star," with a
theatre of my own in Paris. I had had no fear of the ghost said to haunt
the house. Indeed, I remembered thinking, and saying, that the story
only made the place more interesting.
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