At last she could stand it no longer. Her taut nerves had reached the breaking point. She approached her father, not directly telling him of her fears and terrors, but in a rather guarded way. She declared they needed a servant—the work was more than she could handle alone. Her father acquiesced at once. He hardly seemed conscious of what she was saying.
So immediately she commenced advertising in a newspaper that was published in a town about ten miles away, but though she received many answers, no one was willing to take a job in a house on Black Hill. They shunned it as if it had been plague-infested. At last an ex-convict answered the advertisement, a man who had just completed a ten-year prison term and who looked almost as uncouth as a gorilla. His name was Sig. But whether it was his first name or his last he refused to say.
"When I went to prison," he said, "I lost my personality. The man I was is dead. There are no threads of existence for me to take up again. The few living relatives I had went back on me. There isn't a soul in the world willing to give me a chance."
His words sounded so hopeless, Nona felt sorry for him at once, despite his uncouthness.
"If you wish," said she, "you can come and work for us; that is, if you are not afraid of Black Hill."
He laughed savagely.
"I am afraid of nothing," said he emphatically, "death least of all. If I were afraid of anything it would be of life. For ten years I lived in prison, never visited by a soul, haunted by all sorts of wild thoughts and desires for revenge. I was going to 'get' the man that got me."
He smiled mirthlessly.
"Anger is a peculiar thing," he said. "It burns itself out by its very intensity. When I was finally released, my hatred had vanished, leaving me cold. Only hopelessness remained."
Nona could not help thinking how akin was her own case to that of Sig. She felt that like him, she, too, had been shut up in prison until only hopelessness remained.
And yet less than one week later, her viewpoint slightly changed. Much of the somberness vanished, for she met Stark Laurier by the simplest accident. Cass Ledyard had been out walking in the woods and had tripped over a hidden tree-stump, spraining his ankle rather badly. For a while he was unable to walk. He lay on the ground groaning in pain, when Stark Laurier found him. At first he was rather surly despite his agony and was unwilling to accept help, but finally, realizing that he was forced to, his attitude changed. In fact, after Stark Laurier had helped him home—almost carried him in fact—he grew positively cordial and urged Stark to remain with them a while.
"We seldom, in fact never, have company," he said, "and your presence with us would undoubtedly help to break the monotony of the mountain silence."
Stark Laurier agreed with him absolutely after he had met Nona, for he realized that wherever she was no place could be monotonous for him. So that very afternoon he moved his things over to "The Castle." And again the country people shook their heads and declared that no good could come of it.
2
Stark Laurier was a novelist, but fortunately he had inherited a moderate fortune from his father, which permitted him to follow his own inclinations regarding the type of stories he wrote. He specialized in unusual fiction, and therefore "The Castle" was an absolute magnet to him. He was quite young, well under thirty and a keen lover of excitement
