CHAPTER II

AT THE RED HOUSE

 

Burton could have found his way to the Red House without any further direction than the clerk had given him, and it was chiefly curiosity that made him try another experiment on the way. He had come by the side street, and half a block away he saw the large red house facing toward Rowan street. At the rear ran a high board fence, separating the grounds belonging to the house from an alley which cut through the middle of the block. As he passed the end of the alley, he noticed a man and a woman talking together by the gate which opened into the house grounds. The woman's excited gestures caught his attention. She was shaking her hands at the man in a way that might have meant anger or impatience or merely dismissal, but which certainly meant something in a superlative and violent degree. Then she darted in through the gate, slamming it shut, and the man came running down the alley toward the street with a curious low lope that covered the ground amazingly, though it seemed effortless.

Burton had stopped, at first to see whether it were a case that called for interference. Now, as the man jumped out just in front of him, he spoke to him,--as much from a desire to see the face of a man who ran so furtively as from curiosity as to the effect the doctor's name would have. "Pardon me," he said. "Can you tell me if this is where Dr. Underwood lives?"

But this time his cast drew nothing. The man stopped a moment, cast a sharp though furtive glance up at his questioner, and shook his head.

"Don't know," he said curtly, and hurried on. Burton took the liberty of believing that the man had lied.

The Red House had a character and quality of its own that set it immediately apart from the rest of this half-baked town. It was a large house, with signs of age that were grateful to him, set back in extensive grounds which were surrounded by high hedges of shrubbery. The house itself was shaded by old trees, and the general effect of the place was one of aloofness, as different as possible from the cheap, new, easy-going publicity of the rest of the street. If it be true that human beings mould their surrounding to reflect their own characters, then the Underwoods were certainly not commonplace people. Burton was sensitive to influences, and as he stepped inside the grounds and let the gate shut behind him, he had an indefinable feeling that he had 

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