The sun was shining, the children were shouting, the women were gossiping at their doors, when the apothecary stopped at a low one-roomed cottage, the home of Daniel McGair.

He opened the door with a key and went in, as though the house were empty.
It was a plain bare room; there was no curtain on the window and the sun shone in.

There was a smouldering fire in the grate, a bookshelf on one side, still holding its dusty and unused volumes; there was an arm-chair--was that the chair in which he had sat to see his love-gifts trampled down, in which he had received that mysterious stroke from the unseen enemy?
There was also a table in the room, and a chest, and, in the corner, a pallet-bed, upon which lay the withered body of a man.
That was all, except some prints that hung upon the wall, dusty and lifeless-looking.

Such changes do years of disuse make in dwellings which, when inhabited, have been replete with human interest.

Even yet there was abundant indication that the room had once been the abode of one who put much of his own personality into his surroundings.