THE GHOST OF LEMON LANE. 461
nations! You try the house, marm, and if the ghost bothers you, why I'll ask no rent. There! I can’t say fairer?”
“No. It’s a bargain, Mr. Lemon.”
The lady held out one daintily-kidded hand, with a second charming smile.
“It is partly furnished, is it not? Will you show it to me now, that I may know what I want? I wish to enter at once. My name,” with a third electric smile full at-the squire, “is Mrs. Seaton, and my husband has been dead for seven months. He was a merchant in Boston.”
“How uncommonly good-looking she is!” thought the elderly squire, getting a little fluttered under this masked battery of brilliant smiles; “I wish she would put up her veil and let’s have a better look at her. I’m very glad the cottage is going to be rented, and remarkably glad we’re going to have such a real nice tenant! She’ll be company for Nelly, too—keep her from moping her addled wits out among the trees and flowers.”
Side by side, Squire Lemon and his fair tenant sauntered down the leafy lane that led from the house to the cottage. Mrs. Seaton talked viva- ciously, and in a way that showed her heart had not been altogether broken by the decease of the late lamented Mr. Seaton.
Eleanor Lemon, sitting among pansies and daisies under the waving willows, idling over Tennyson, looked up in some surprise at her father, and the stately lady in widow’s weeds. Mrs. Seaton glanced her bright eyes that way too.
“Your daughter, I presume, Squire Lemon? I heard you had an only daughter. Such a very, very pretty girl! She's exceedingly like you!”
“What a delightful woman this is!” thought the squire. “'Pon my word, it’s a pleasure to hear her talk!”
“Has she been ill?” the widow said; she looks sadly pale.”
“Well, ma’am,” said Squire Lemon, in an outburst of confidence, “I'll tell you how itis! She’s been, and set her heart on some chap down to Boston—a drygoods clerk, without money in his pocket, or, I suppose, brains in his head—one George Lyon, if ever you heard the name. I let her go, last Christmas, to spend the holidays with her aunt—and what does she do but come back engaged! But I’ll take the nonsense out of her. She’s kinder pining, you see, ma’am, as young folks will in these cases, and she’s took to poetry and turning pale. By-and-by, Mrs. Seaton, I’ll get you to talk to her, and reason her out of her nonsense. Here’s the house, ma’am—walk right. in.”
The squire and the widow explored the house, and the widow was delighted.
“I’ll have a piano in that corner,” she said, “and this shall be my sleeping-room. I won't have a servant for two reasons—the first, I prefer to do my own work; the second, no one would live in the haunted house. I'll move in this very evening.”
Mrs. Seaton was a woman of delightful energy and promptitude. Before the sun set, everything needful was disposed within the cottage, and Mrs. Seaton herself came with the dusk. And all Lemonville knew that the haunted house had a tenant, and great was the wondering thereat.
Early next forenoon, the squire called politely upon his new tenant. He entered the parlor, where a delicious half-light reigned, where a piano stood, and flowers bloomed, and where the widow, still in trailing sab!es and jet ornaments, received him. She was handsome, very handsome, in a large and grand sort of way, and was not an inch under five feet ten—Squire Lemon’s style precisely
“I always did like your big, and buxom, and bouncing sort of women,” thought the squire, sitting complacently under the light of sparkling If ever I marry again,” surveying the magnificent “Cleopatra before him, “I should like a woman like this Mrs. Seaton.”
Mrs. Seaton might have been a witch, so artfully did she wile away the time. She talked to the squire, she played for him, she sang for him, she laughed and jested, and derided the ghost, and made herself altogether so bewitching, that the squire found it was one o'clock, and his dinner-time, before he thought half an hour was gone.
«Come again,” Mrs. Seaton said, as he rose to go, ‘tit would be a charity to my loneliness. And send your pretty, pale daughter, please.”
The squire went home all in a delightful tingle and glow. On the way he met his pale, pensive Eleanor.
“Nelly,” he said, with unusual gentleness, “you look dull, child. Go and call on Mrs. Seaton at the cottage. She’s a delightful person, and will cheer you up directly.”
‘Yes, papa,” Eleanor said, listlessly. She didn’t care much for Mrs. Seaton, and she rather preferred moping herself to death, since she was never more to see her darling George; but her aimless feet turned of themselves down the lane in the direction of the cottage. The tall, handsome widow stood in the vine-wreathed doorway, among the climbing roses, like a picture in a frame.
