Upton answered indifferently: "It's old Miss Lorburn's place, out the other side of Paul's Landing. Nobody's lived there since she died, ages ago, and she left a funny will, and we have to go out once a fortnight and see to the house being aired and the knickknacks dusted. There's a sort of hired man lives on the place, but he isn't allowed into Miss Lorburn's rooms, and Mother and I have to see that they're kept clean, and just the way she left them."

"Was this Miss Lorburn a relative of your father's?"

"Oh, very distant, I guess. She left the place to one of her nephews, an old bachelor who never comes there; and it's he who arranged for Mother to keep an eye on things."

Vance meditated, his interest beginning to stir. "What sort of a place is it?"

"I don't know, nothing particular. Just an old house."

An old house! Upton spoke the words indifferently, almost contemptuously: they seemed to signify nothing to him. But they stirred Vance's blood. An old house! It occurred to him that he had never seen a really old house in his life. But Upton was young—a good deal younger than himself. What did he mean by the epithet? His perspectives were probably even shorter than Vance's.

"How old? As old as this house?" Vance questioned.

"Oh, ages older. My father used to go there when he was a little boy. It was an old house then. He could just remember seeing old Miss Lorburn, Mother says. She lived to be very old. She was a friend of my grandfather's, I believe. It's a dreary place anyhow. Laura Lou hates it. She says the rooms are full of ghosts, and she's scared of it. But I say it's because she hates missing her Saturday afternoon at the movies."

"Upton—" Laura Lou again protested.

"Well, you do. And Mother don't like you to go to the Willows because you break things. But you'll have to, tomorrow."

Laura Lou made no answer, and Vance pursued his interrogatory. "And who are those ladies your mother spoke about, who come in and raise a row?"

"Oh, Mrs. Spear and her daughter. Mrs. Spear was a Lorburn. They won't come tomorrow—not in this heat. If they're here—and I'm not sure they are anyhow—"

"Here? At Paul's Landing?"

"Well, they live up at Eaglewood, another Lorburn place, a couple of miles from here, up the mountain. There's a grand view of the river from there. It's in the guidebooks. And they're supposed to come down to the Willows now and then, and keep an eye on us, the way we do on the hired man."

"How many Lorburn places are there round here?"

"They owned pretty near the whole place before the Revolution. Now there's only these two houses left."

"I suppose they had a big real estate boom, and got rid of everything?"