A flavor of romance and mystery hung around Florence Fane’s origin.

John Banks, the kind-hearted carpenter, had taken the sobbing child nine years ago from the side of her dead mother and carried her home to his childless wife, who,[10] because Floy seemed to have no kith or kin, had taken her into her heart and called her daughter, and both lavished a world of tenderness on the seven-year-old child. But save in nobility of nature and a tender heart, she was no more like the homely pair than a restless humming-bird is like a toiling honey-bee. She was rarely, exquisitely beautiful, lovable after an imperious fashion, but willful and untamable in disposition, the result of spoiling by a too fond and overindulgent mother, who at the last had deserted her by fleeing from life’s pains and penalties by the forbidden path of suicide.

[10]

Floy was heiress by her birth to a small estate and to a terrible taint of blood—the mania for suicide.

She was a descendant of the Nellest family, that for forty years had numbered in each decade a suicide among its members.

The scene of these tragedies was at an old farm-house on a lonely road two miles from Mount Vernon.

The house, a substantial and somewhat pretentious structure of rough dark stone, overgrown picturesquely in many places with creeping ivy, stood back from the road in a magnificent grove of old oak-trees, and twenty-five acres of rich farming land stretched away in the rear.

But so grewsome was the reputation of the place, that for nine years it had had no tenants, and its name had changed, by tacit consent of the neighborhood, from Nellest Farm to Suicide Place.

The Nellest family had owned and tilled this farm almost a hundred years, but in the middle of the century the head of the family had committed suicide by cutting his throat, and just ten years later, his only son was found hanging from a tree near the spot where his father died.

[11]

[11]

The widow of the son, with her only daughter, continued to reside at the farm, employing a competent man to manage it. But when another decade rolled around, the neighborhood was horrified to learn that the manager had shot himself in the head, adding the third to the list of deaths by suicidal mania.

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