INVADING THE UNKNOWN.

Turning his head back to glance at Gerald, already half hid by the bushes straggling beside the path, Philip followed the weather-worn fence on his left. The garden into which he now looked seemed to be flourishing, chiefly in the way of Indian corn and tomatoes and string-beans. As he came closer to the house, and its outward structure was clearer, he noticed that it was more dignified and solid looking than most of its sort. It might almost be termed a mansion. It was built of grayish stone and white-painted wood, the second story covered by the high-pitched roof with its at least dozen dormer-windows. Both down-stairs and up-stairs many of these windows were closed.

“Family must be small, and all busy somewhere in the back, or perhaps in the garden,” Philip concluded, advancing.

A harmless snake darted across the way as[164] he at length raised the gate-latch. He called out, “Holloa, here!” in as loud a tone as his fatigue permitted. His only answer was the dog’s leaping forward through the shrubbery from a nook under one of the trees. But this canine warder proved to be all bark and no bite. At the sight of Philip unlatching the gate his objections subsided to a growl, his bound ended in a trot, and his tail suddenly began wagging eagerly.

“Good fellow!” exclaimed Philip, walking up the path and holding out his hand. “Changed your mind, have you? You don’t think I look like a thief, eh? I should think I did—very much.”

The dog jumped on him, whining curiously. He pursued the path toward the front porch, which was shaded with roses, carefully trained. The asters and geraniums on all sides showed recent care, and on a strip of grass near the porch lay a row of clean pans; and two white aprons lay bleaching, and several fat hens were scratching comfortably together under a lilac-bush. The front window-shutters, with the exception of the furthest one—faded gray-green affairs, all of them, with half-moons cut[165] in their broad, wooden expanses—were shut. Touchtone rapped at the front door, letting the iron knocker do its duty smartly. No footsteps replied. The dog stared at him very intently. Impatient of delay, he hurried around the corner of the house.

A walk of cinders bordered with clam-shells and china-pinks and zinnia led him toward it, past what he presumed was the sitting-room or dining-room, and two of the windows were open. Nobody was to be seen or heard yet, outside or in. He leaned over a window and peered inside. A tall, white-covered bed, with four posts and towering pillows, and various articles of furniture that his eyes glanced at in his bold inspection, loomed out in the cool dimness.

“The spare chamber, of course,” he at once concluded. “Empty—in good order for unexpected company—like Gerald and me.”

He slowly passed on, turning his head to left and right. The dog preceded him, whining and making sure that Touchtone followed. A well, with its arbored trellis, was on the left. He drank and was on the point of turning back to relieve Gerald’s thirst, but thought it better to go on. Upon a grass-plot more[166] aprons and some towels were bleaching, and a row of red crocks were sunned on an unpainted bench by the back door. He reached the kitchen. It was open.

“Holloa, here!” he called again before the door, peering into the cool room then and once more turning to survey the garden-beds, in which more poultry strayed.

By this time the fatigues of the past few hours were half-forgotten in a certain new excitement.

“Well, Towzer, if your people are all away and are willing to leave their house and home open and unprotected, in this free and easy sort of fashion, pirates must be out of date with a vengeance! I don’t know what strangers coming to them for charity can do except to do what Mrs. Wooden calls ‘act according to their best lights’—eh?” The dog had trotted into the kitchen behind him, and now stood wagging his tail and barking a sharp note, here and there, beside an empty platter that rested on the hearth.

“Cold? Yes, and there hasn’t been a fire in that stove for hours and hours,” exclaimed Philip, examining; “nor have you been fed,[167] Towzer, I begin to suspect, within the same time, have you? That’s what’s the matter with you. Whoever lives here has gone off on some errand or other away from the island. What sort of errand can it be that has made the family stay so much longer than they must have expected to stay?” Vague, disagreeable feelings crossed Touchtone’s mind. It was strange. “I must be certain of things in the place before I go back to Gerald. What if there should have been some plague, some awful accident on the premises?”

He began to wonder, almost to dread, what might come under his eyes any minute. Suppose that this lonely house would not prove the shelter for them at all. Various reasons for the silence and desertion of the dwelling, despite all signs of recent occupancy and peaceful daily life, came thronging.

He paused a moment, leaning against a clean kitchen-table whereon were set several pieces of china ready to be laid upon the shelves around the walls—another task mysteriously postponed. The dog he had christened Towzer now whined and fawned on him hungrily. Philip whistled loudly, once, twice, half a[168] dozen times. Then he opened the door in front of him and proceeded deeper into the dwelling.

Its central hall was before him, lighted cheerfully by a good-sized fan-light over the front entrance. The hall was of rather uncommon width and height of ceiling, carpeted with a faded but unworn green ingrain and with several antiquated rugs. Philip looked quickly into the front chamber on his right. It was the large, well-furnished bedroom he had glanced into from the garden-walk. The bed was made. He noticed a hat-rack beside the hall entrance on which depended a huge straw hat, a woman’s sun-bonnet and a straw bonnet, and two umbrellas; and a wide-open closet near by contained various water-proofs, boots and shoes, and two or three pairs of clean blue overalls. He turned the knob of the parlor door and withdrew it, murmuring,

“Locked, I declare! Regular New Englanders, whatever else they are—believe in saving the parlor for Sundays and their own funerals.”

The sitting-room on the other side was full of the usual simple furnishings of such living-rooms.[169] The pictures were old revolutionary scenes, besides President Lincoln and his family and an engrossed copy of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, in photograph. Up in one corner hung two highly elaborate samplers, framed in an old-fashioned, heavy style. On one of these “MARY ABIGAIL JENNISON, August, 1827,” was stiffly worked under the claws of a red and yellow bird of paradise; on the other he read, “SARAH AMANDA JENNISON, August, 1827,” who boasted for her finer art the alphabet and the numerals arranged in rows around a red book and a green willow-tree.

“Old, those,” Philip thought. “I guess the Jennison ladies must be pretty well tired out with housekeeping if they are the heads of this establishment at present.”

There were sundry photographs on the walls, that he had not time to examine closely, of elderly men and women with plain, hard-featured New England faces.

The door into the room behind the sitting-room stood open. It was quite light, each shutter turned back. This appeared considerably more of a living-room than its fellows,[170] with a sewing-machine, a big table with stockings, hickory shirts, and coarse mending, a cracked looking-glass with a comb and brush in front of it, and a quantity of miscellaneous articles distributed about. Suddenly Philip perceived a pile of very modern-looking, paper-covered books and a heap of newspapers.

“At last!” he ejaculated. He caught up several numbers of a weekly religious magazine. On the yellow label he read, “Obed Probasco, Chantico,” and the name of the State. On other copies of the Knoxport Weekly Anchor he found scrawled by the newsdealer the same name. Some new numbers of the Ladies’ Own Monthly were directed, “Mrs. Obed Probasco, Chantico.” The paper-covered novels, three or four agricultural hand-books, and half a dozen recipe-books were neatly marked in similar fashion.

A last assurance that these were at least the ruling spirits throughout this lonely island, whose nearest post-office on the main-land was, doubtless, the to............