“Don’t get excited, David!” said staid Miss Arabella. “Suppose that you should discover something to the discredit of Burton, what use could and would you make of it?”
The veins in Chapman’s thin neck and bony brow became swollen and distended as if straining to burst the skin that covered them; his eyes flashed baleful fire, as extending his arm and grasping the empty air as if it were his enemy, he fairly hissed:
“I! I! I would tear him out of the house of J. Dunlap, intruder that he is, and cast him into the gutter! Yea! though I tore the heartstrings of a million women such as Lucy Dunlap! What is she or her heart in comparison with the glory of Boston’s oldest business name?”
Panting, as a weary hound, who exhausted but exultant, fastens his fangs in the hunted stag, overcome by the violence of his hatred, David Chapman dropped down into his chair.
Nestling among grand old oaks and profusion of shrubbery, now leafless in the November air of New England, on the top of the highest hill in that portion of the suburbs, sat the “Eyrie,” the bachelor home of Walter Burton.
Though the house was small, the conservatory adjoining it was one of the largest in the city. Burton was an ardent lover of flowers, and an active collector of rare plants. The house stood in the center of an extensive and well kept garden through which winding paths ran in every direction.
The place would have seemed lonely to one not possessing within himself resources sufficient to furnish him entertainment independent of the society of others.
Burton never knew loneliness. He was an accomplished musician, an artist of more than ordinary ability, a zealous horticulturist, and an omnivorous devourer of books.
A housekeeper who was cook at the same time, one man and a boy for the garden and conservatory and a valet constituted the household servants of the “Eyrie.”
At the moment that Chapman’s wrathful mind was expressing its concentrated hate for him, the owner of the white house on the hill sat before the open grand piano in his music-room, his shapely hands wandering listlessly over the keys, touching them once in a while in an aimless manner. The young man’s mind was filled with other thoughts than music.