The Lady from Nowhere by Fergus Hume

It was a bright and sunny day when Gebb found himself once more at Kirkstone Hall. In the sunshine the building looked grim and desolate. The smokeless chimneys, the closed doors, dusty windows, and grass-grown terraces, gave the place a forlorn and wretched aspect; and the absence of life, the silence broken only by the twittering of the birds, the neglected gardens, created, even to the detective's prosaic mind, an atmosphere of menace and dread. It looked like a place with a history; and Gebb wondered if Miss Wedderburn, on becoming its mistress, would care to inhabit it again.

"When she marries Ferris and begins a new life, I dare say she will seek some more cheerful abode," he thought, as he stood on the terrace, and looked on the silent house. "It would be foolish for a young couple to dwell with the ghosts of the past. I am not imaginative myself, but I should not care to live here; no, not if the house was given to me rent free. If I were Miss Wedderburn I'd pull it down and build a new place without a past or a ghost."