January 1910

I

"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."

The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a

bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp

perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the

December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the

library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they

sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very

house of which the library in question was the central, the

pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a

country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties,

had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight

to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case;

but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously,

several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it

out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's

cousins, and you can get it for a song."

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its

remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water

pipes, and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading

in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of

the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition,

with unusual architectural felicities.

"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was

thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the

two, had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience'

would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with

the pieces numbered, and set up again." And they had proceeded

to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions

and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin

recommended was REALLY Tudor till they learned it had no heating

system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds

till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-

supply.

"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued

to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively

wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a

sudden relapse to distrust: "And the ghost? You've been

concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!"

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her

laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent

perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida's

answering hilarity.

"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."

"Yes, yes; but that won't do. I don't want to have to drive ten

miles to see somebody else's ghost. I want one of my own on the

premises. IS there a ghost at Lyng?"

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that

she had flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there IS one, of course,

but you'll never know it."

"Never know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world

constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"

"I can't say. But that's the story."

"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"

"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."

"Till afterward?"

"Not till long, long afterward."

"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why

hasn't its signalement been handed down in the family? How has

it managed to preserve its incognito?"

Alida could only shake her head. "Don't ask me. But it has."

"And then suddenly--" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous

depth of divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's

self, 'THAT WAS it?'"

She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her

question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the

shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils.

"I suppose so. One just has to wait."

"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost

who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than

that, Mary?"

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to,

for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair

they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for

to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had

actually begun for them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-

hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the

sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to

a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such

sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years

the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne

had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness

that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue

Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the

leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new

state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves

only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting

and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of

the production of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of

Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could

be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world,

or plunge deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of

remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.

But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the

whole incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they

put it--that for the production of its effects so little of a

given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and

so short a distance a difference.

"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives

such depth to their effects, such relief to their least

contrasts. They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every

exquisite mouthful."

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray

house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the

finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact

that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,

abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having

been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had

probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no

doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet

drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond

between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes

breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and

Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an

intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December

afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she

rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.

Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long

tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred

to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried

security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude

that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the

afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the

morning's work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as

she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between

his eyes had never been there in his engineering days. Then he

had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native

demon of "worry" had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages

he had so far read to her--the introduction, and a synopsis of

the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession of his

subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had

done with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one

other possible element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were

his health, then? But physically he had gained since they had

come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed.

It was only within a week that she had felt in him the

undefinable change that made her restless in his absence, and as

tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who had a

secret to keep from him!

The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck

her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her

down the dim, long room.

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to

be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and

layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky

walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in

the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been

gradually discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary

had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the

customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a

vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to

impart. The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient

identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time

the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-

and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses

good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its

beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly

concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so

much that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence

as THE ghost." And thereupon their invisible housemate had

finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous

enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier

curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense

gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of

the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that

possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but

secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close

enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret,

and acquire the ghost-sight on one's own account. Perhaps, in

his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never

trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it

already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever

it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of

the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the

ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-

breeding as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did

not really satisfy her. "What, after all, except for the fun of

the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of

their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown back once more on

the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less

susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing

on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not

know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing

Ned HAD seen one when they first came, and had known only within

the last week what had happened to him? More and more under the

spell of the hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the

early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay

confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling

to each other from remote corners of the house as treasure after

treasure of their habitation revealed itself to them. It was in

this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain

soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the

first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of

the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel

that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to

an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the roof which, from

below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but

practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown

down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of

her discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the narrow

ledge, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to

the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped

contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the

fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.

"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about

within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed,

like some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled

court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching

up to the highroad under the downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she

had felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her

turn to glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a

shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face;

and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in

loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering

down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a

stranger seeking his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her

but a blurred impression of slightness and grayness, with

something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure

or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen

enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash

down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for

the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional

clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to

follow him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the

attic landing she paused again for a less definite reason,

leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the

silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths below. She lingered

there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a

door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow

flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and

hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and

after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she

quickly crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone,

vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but

the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even,

as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

"What was it? Who was it?" she asked.

"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

"The man we saw coming toward the house."

He seemed honestly to reflect. "The man? Why, I thought I saw

Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains,

but he had disappeared before I could get down."

"Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw

him."

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. "So I thought; but he must have

got up steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a

scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?"

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than

nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic

of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had

dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine

heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the

mere fact of the other incident's having occurred on the very day

of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the

unconscious fold of association from which it now emerged; for in

itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there

could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash

himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It

was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the

other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying

in wait for them, and dashing out at them with questions,

reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the distance the gray

figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's

explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety

on his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him

anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to

confer with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains,

had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary

could not say that any one of these considerations had occurred

to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now

marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that

they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.

II

Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The

library was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how

much faint light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped

itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a

mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as

it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, "It's the

ghost!"

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man

of whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from

the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal

himself as NOT having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the

impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick

of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and

character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband's;

and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the

confession of her folly.

"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold,

"but I never CAN remember!"

"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.

"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no

response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged,

preoccupied face.

"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable

interval.

"Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad

determination to spot it!"

"Me--just now?" His arm dropped away, and he turned from her

with a faint echo of her laugh. "Really, dearest, you'd better

give it up, if that's the best you can do."

"Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have YOU?" she asked, turning

round on him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the

light struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she

presented.

"Have YOU?" Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had

disappeared on her errand of illumination.

"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the

sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the

letters.

"Given up trying to see the ghost." Her heart beat a little at

the experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow

of the hearth.

"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a

newspaper.

"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is

that there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long

afterward."

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but

after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically

between his hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you

any idea HOW LONG?"

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her

seat she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was

darkly projected against the circle of lamplight.

"No; none. Have YOU?" she retorted, repeating her former phrase

with an added keenness of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently

turned back with it toward the lamp.

"Lord, no! I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of

impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"

"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impulse to add, "What

makes you ask?" was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-

maid with tea and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily

domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that

sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her

solitary afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself silently

to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she

was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her

husband's face. He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and

was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something

he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of

view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The

longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed

itself. The lines of painful tension had vanished, and such

traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily

attributable to steady mental effort. He glanced up, as if drawn

by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

"I'm dying for my tea, you know; and here's a letter for you," he

said.

She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she

proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with

the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all

inclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.

Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the

letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her

husband a long newspaper clipping.

"Ned! What's this? What does it mean?"

He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry

before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and

she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an

advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.

"What's what? You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length,

moving toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The

shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of

fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that

gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

"This article--from the 'Waukesha Sentinel'--that a man named

Elwell has brought suit against you--that there was something

wrong about the Blue Star Mine. I can't understand more than

half."

They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her

astonishment, she saw that her words had the almost immediate

effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.

"Oh, THAT!" He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it

with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and

familiar. "What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I

thought you'd got bad news."

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly

under the reassuring touch of his composure.

"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"

"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."

"But what IS it? I don't understand. What does this man accuse

you of?"

"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar." Boyne had

tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an

arm-chair near the fire. "Do you want to hear the story? It's

not particularly interesting--just a squabble over interests in

the Blue Star."

"But who is this Elwell? I don't know the name."

"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you

all about him at the time."

"I daresay. I must have forgotten." Vainly she strained back

among her memories. "But if you helped him, why does he make

this return?"

"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him

over. It's all rather technical and complicated. I thought that

kind of thing bored you."

His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she

deprecated the American wife's detachment from her husband's

professional interests, but in practice she had always found it

difficult to fix her attention on Boyne's report of the

transactions in which his varied interests involved him.

Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community where

the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of

efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such

brief leisure as they could command should be used as an escape

from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always

dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had

actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself

if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no

more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now,

for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little

she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was

built.

She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the

composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite

grounds for her reassurance.

"But doesn't this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to

me about it?"

He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at

first because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it's all

ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a

back number of the 'Sentinel.'"

She felt a quick thrill of relief. "You mean it's over? He's

lost his case?"

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply. "The suit's

been withdrawn--that's all."

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward

charge of being too easily put off. "Withdrawn because he saw he

had no chance?"

"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back

of her thoughts.

"How long ago was it withdrawn?"

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty.

"I've just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."

"Just now--in one of your letters?"

"Yes; in one of my letters."

She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of

waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had

placed himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did

so, pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp

it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met

the smiling clearness of his eyes.

"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the

flood of her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never

was righter!" he laughed back at her, holding her close.

III

One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of

all the next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and

complete recovery of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room;

it accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed

out at her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from

the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian

teapot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused

apprehensions of the previous day, with their moment of sharp

concentration about the newspaper article,--as if this dim

questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,--

had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral

obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband's

affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith

in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right

to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face

of menace and suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled,

more naturally and unconsciously in possession of himself, than

after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it

was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking doubts, and had

wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that

surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from

the house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne

at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door,

by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his

mouth, above his papers, and now she had her own morning's task

to perform. The task involved on such charmed winter days almost

as much delighted loitering about the different quarters of her

demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and borders.

There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,

such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old

place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the

winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn

executed. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this

particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the

sweet, still place. She went first to the kitchen-garden, where

the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the walls,

and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated

roof of their cot. There was something wrong about the piping of

the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester,

who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the

boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the

greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of

old-fashioned exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--

she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day being

too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again

and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green to

the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass

terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a

view of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and

the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale

gold moisture of the air.

Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the

suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and

hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human

presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience.

She had never before had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it,

such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as

they said to children, "for one's good," so complete a trust in

its power to gather up her life and Ned's into the harmonious

pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the sun.

She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the

gardener, accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only

one figure was in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man,

who, for reasons she could not on the spot have specified, did

not remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority on

hot-house boilers. The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat,

and paused with the air of a gentleman--perhaps a traveler--

desirous of having it immediately known that his intrusion is

involuntary. The local fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the

more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the

stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing

it. But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she

asked, in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his

attitude: "Is there any one you wish to see?"

"I came to see Mr. Boyne," he replied. His intonation, rather

than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar

note, looked at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat

cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her

short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving

"on business," and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.

Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims;

but she was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful

of his having given any one the right to intrude on them.

"Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?" she asked.

He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.

"Not exactly an appointment," he replied.

"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't

receive you now. Will you give me a message, or come back

later?"

The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would

come back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of

the house. As his figure receded down the walk between the yew

hedges, Mary saw him pause and look up an instant at the peaceful

house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck her,

with a tardy touch of compunction, that it would have been more

humane to ask if he had come from a distance, and to offer, in

that case, to inquire if her husband could receive him. But as

the thought occurred to her he passed out of sight behind a

pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was

distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the

bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from

Dorchester.

The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues

that they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his

train, and beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the

morning in absorbed confabulation among the greenhouses. She was

startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly

luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the

house, to see her husband coming out to meet her. But she found

no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and

the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed

Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.

Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and

there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations

of the outlay to which the morning's conference had committed

her. The knowledge that she could permit herself such follies

had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the

vague apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an

element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had

said, things in general had never been "righter."

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the

parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously

worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was

one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were

divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers,

merely murmured an absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in

rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps

sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers,

crossed the hall, and went to the library door. It was still

closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her

husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his normal measure

of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, the

esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and

Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.

Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to

discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of

the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it

became clear to her that he was not in the library.

She turned back to the parlor-maid.

"Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is

ready."

The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of

obeying orders and an equally obvious conviction of the

foolishness of the injunction laid upon her. The struggle

resulted in her saying doubtfully, "If you please, Madam, Mr.

Boyne's not up-stairs."

"Not in his room? Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, Madam."

Mary consulted the clock. "Where is he, then?"

"He's gone out," Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one

who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered

mind would have first propounded.

Mary's previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have

gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it

was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door,

instead of going round to the court. She crossed the hall to the

glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlor-

maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring

out recklessly, "Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne didn't go that way."

Mary turned back. "Where DID he go? And when?"

"He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam." It was a

matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one

question at a time.

"Up the drive? At this hour?" Mary went to the door herself,

and glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare

limes. But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned

it on entering the house.

"Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?" she asked.

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the

forces of chaos.

"No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman."

"The gentleman? What gentleman?" Mary wheeled about, as if to

front this new factor.

"The gentleman who called, Madam," said Trimmle, resignedly.

"When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!"

Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to

consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her

to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now

she was detached enough to note in Trimmle's eye the dawning

defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too

hard.

"I couldn't exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn't let the

gentleman in," she replied, with the air of magnanimously

ignoring the irregularity of her mistress's course.

"You didn't let him in?"

"No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--"

"Go and ask Agnes, then," Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore

her look of patient magnanimity. "Agnes would not know, Madam,

for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of

the new lamp from town--" Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always

been opposed to the new lamp--"and so Mrs. Dockett sent the

kitchen-maid instead."

Mary looked again at the clock. "It's after two! Go and ask the

kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word."

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently

brought her there the kitchen-maid's statement that the gentleman

had called about one o'clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with

him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even

know the caller's name, for he had written it on a slip of paper,

which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to

deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.

Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was

over, and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her

wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It

was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so

unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor

whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the

more unaccountable. Mary Boyne's experience as the wife of a

busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep

irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of

surprises; but since Boyne's withdrawal from business he had

adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for

the dispersed and agitated years, with their "stand-up" lunches

and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he

cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony,

discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected; and declaring

that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of

pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.

Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the

unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne's precautions would

sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had

cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the

station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.

This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she

went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener.

Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away;

and when she turned toward home, the early twilight was setting

in.

She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne,

meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the

highroad, there was little likelihood of their meeting on the

way. She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house

before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without

even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the

library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted

precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the

papers on her husband's desk lay precisely as they had lain when

she had gone in to call him to luncheon.

Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown.

She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood

alone in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take

shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among

the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-

discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and

knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she

threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate

pull.

The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with

a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of

the usual.

"You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in," she said, to justify her

ring.

"Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in," said Trimmle,

putting down the lamp.

"Not in? You mean he's come back and gone out again?"

"No, Madam. He's never been back."

The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

"Not since he went out with--the gentleman?"

"Not since he went out with the gentleman."

"But who WAS the gentleman?" Mary gasped out, with the sharp note

of some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless

noises.

"That I couldn't say, Madam." Trimmle, standing there by the

lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though

eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.

"But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn't it the kitchen-maid who let

him in?"

"She doesn't know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a

folded paper."

Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both

designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of

the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their

allusions within the bounds of custom. And at the same moment

her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.

"But he must have a name! Where is the paper?"

She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered

documents that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an

unfinished letter in her husband's hand, with his pen lying

across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.

"My dear Parvis,"--who was Parvis?--"I have just received your

letter announcing Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is

now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"

She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no

folded paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of

manuscript which had been swept together in a promiscuous heap,

as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.

"But the kitchen-maid SAW him. Send her here," she commanded,

wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a

solution.

Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be

out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated

underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her

questions pat.

The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood. But what

had he said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first

question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason

that he had said so little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and,

scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it

should at once be carried in to him.

"Then you don't know what he wrote? You're not sure it WAS his

name?"

The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had

written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should

announce.

"And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he

say?"

The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything,

but she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the

paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the

visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped

out, leaving the two gentlemen together.

"But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that

they went out of the house?"

This question plunged the witness into momentary

inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by

means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that

before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard

the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front

door together.

"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell

me what he looked like."

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it

became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had

been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to "show

in" a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental

order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless

disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting

efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you

might say--"

"Different? How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own

mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it

that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent

impressions.

"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a

youngish face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity

of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate

answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down

the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger--the

stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before?

She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called

for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he, and why

had Boyne obeyed his call?

IV

It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that

they had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly

hard place to get lost in."

A CONFOUNDEDLY HARD PLACE TO GET LOST IN! That had been her

husband's phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official

investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and

across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne's name blazing from

the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung

her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted

criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed,

surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like

guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife's

anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something

they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne's disappearance there had been no

word of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual

misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had

been few and fleeting. No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid

had seen him leave the house, and no one else had seen "the

gentleman" who accompanied him. All inquiries in the

neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger's presence

that day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward

Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighboring

villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the

local railway-stations. The sunny English noon had swallowed him

as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.

Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at

its highest pressure, had ransacked her husband's papers for any

trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or

obligations unknown to her, that might throw a faint ray into the

darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of

Boyne's life, they had disappeared as completely as the slip of

paper on which the visitor had written his name. There remained

no possible thread of guidance except--if it were indeed an

exception--the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act

of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter,

read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police,

yielded little enough for conjecture to feed on.

"I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose there

is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--" That was

all. The "risk of trouble" was easily explained by the newspaper

clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her

husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise.

The only new information conveyed in the letter was the fact of

its showing Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of

the results of the suit, though he had assured his wife that it

had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself declared that

the plaintiff was dead. It took several weeks of exhaustive

cabling to fix the identity of the "Parvis" to whom the

fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these

inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts

concerning the Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have

had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the

facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and

he declared himself unable to divine with what object Boyne

intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's

feverish search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks

that followed. Mary knew that the investigations were still

being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually

slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It

was as though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded

image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as the

distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their

normal gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the

dark event. No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week

and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was

slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of

consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from

the vaporous caldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne's consciousness gradually felt the same lowering

of velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of

conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat.

There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the

victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the

body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror,

accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions

of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed

into a phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar

routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the

meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest

impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the

routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she

felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an

insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs

and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in

spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical

recommendation of "change." Her friends supposed that her

refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would

one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a

beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting.

But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish

inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was

sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of

her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on

the threshold. She had even renounced, one by one, the various

theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the

press, the police, and her own agonized imagination. In sheer

lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and

sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would

ever know. But the house KNEW; the library in which she spent

her long, lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last

scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and

spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him.

The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves

had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense

consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out

into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation

never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one

of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to

them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute

accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had

surprised. And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its

portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by

any human means.

V

"I don't say it WASN'T straight, yet don't say it WAS straight.

It was business."

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked

intently at the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" on it had

been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the

name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read

it at the head of Boyne's unfinished letter. In the library she

had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald

head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through

her to know that this was the person to whom her husband's last

known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a

man who has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of

his visit. He had "run over" to England on business, and finding

himself in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to

leave it without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without

asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about

Bob Elwell's family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's

bosom. Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by

his unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his

question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her

continued ignorance of the subject. Was it possible that she

really knew as little as she said?

"I know nothing--you must tell me," she faltered out; and her

visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even

to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a

lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her

husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the

cost of "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the

chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who

had "put him on" to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering

glance through his impartial glasses.

"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he

might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It's the

kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it's

what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr.

Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried

to frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that

nauseated her.

"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something

dishonorable?"

Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. "Oh, no, I

don't. I don't even say it wasn't straight." He glanced up and

down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have

supplied him with the definition he sought. "I don't say it

WASN'T straight, and yet I don't say it WAS straight. It was

business." After all, no definition in his category could be

more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her

like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless

power.

"But Mr. Elwell's lawyers apparently did not take your view,

since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice."

"Oh, yes, they knew he hadn't a leg to stand on, technically. It

was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got

desperate. You see, he'd borrowed most of the money he lost in

the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That's why he shot himself

when they told him he had no show."

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.

"He shot himself? He killed himself because of THAT? "

"Well, he didn't kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months

before he died." Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally

as a gramophone grinding out its "record."

"You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried

again?"

"Oh, he didn't have to try again," said Parvis, grimly.

They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-

glass thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms

stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

"But if you knew all this," she began at length, hardly able to

force her voice above a whisper, "how is it that when I wrote you

at the time of my husband's disappearance you said you didn't

understand his letter?"

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. "Why, I

didn't understand it--strictly speaking. And it wasn't the time

to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when

the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have

helped you to find your husband."

Mary continued to scrutinize him. "Then why are you telling me

now?"

Still Parvis did not hesitate. "Well, to begin with, I supposed

you knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances

of Elwell's death. And then people are talking of it now; the

whole matter's been raked up again. And I thought, if you didn't

know, you ought to."

She remained silent, and he continued: "You see, it's only come

out lately what a bad state Elwell's affairs were in. His wife's

a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out

to work, and taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--

something with the heart, I believe. But she had his bedridden

mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under

it, and finally had to ask for help. That attracted attention to

the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was

started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the

prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people

began to wonder why--"

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. "Here," he

continued, "here's an account of the whole thing from the

'Sentinel'--a little sensational, of course. But I guess you'd

better look it over."

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly,

remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room,

the perusal of a clipping from the "Sentinel" had first shaken

the depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring

head-lines, "Widow of Boyne's Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,"

ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The

first was her husband's, taken from a photograph made the year

they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she

liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in

her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it

would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her

lids with the sharpness of the pain.

"I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--" she

heard Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other

portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in

rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a

projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before?

She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat

and ears. Then she gave a cry.

"This is the man--the man who came for my husband!"

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she

had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was

bending above her in alarm. With an intense effort she

straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she

had dropped.

"It's the man! I should know him anywhere!" she cried in a voice

that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis's voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,

fog-muffled windings.

"Mrs. Boyne, you're not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall

I get a glass of water?"

"No, no, no!" She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically

clenching the newspaper. "I tell you, it's the man! I KNOW him!

He spoke to me in the garden!"

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the

portrait. "It can't be, Mrs. Boyne. It's Robert Elwell."

"Robert Elwell?" Her white stare seemed to travel into space.

"Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him."

"Came for Boyne? The day he went away?" Parvis's voice dropped

as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as

if to coax her gently back into her seat. "Why, Elwell was dead!

Don't you remember?"

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what

he was saying.

"Don't you remember Boyne's unfinished letter to me--the one you

found on his desk that day? It was written just after he'd heard

of Elwell's death." She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's

unemotional voice. "Surely you remember that!" he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it.

Elwell had died the day before her husband's disappearance; and

this was Elwell's portrait; and it was the portrait of the man

who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and

looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne

witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in

that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the

misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-

forgotten words--words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at

Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at

Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.

"This was the man who spoke to me," she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his

disturbance under what he imagined to be an expression of

indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue.

"He thinks me mad; but I'm not mad," she reflected; and suddenly

there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange

affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting

till she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then

she said, looking straight at Parvis: "Will you answer me one

question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill

himself?"

"When--when?" Parvis stammered.

"Yes; the date. Please try to remember."

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. "I have a

reason," she insisted gently.

"Yes, yes. Only I can't remember. About two months before, I

should say."

"I want the date," she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. "We might see here," he said,

still humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. "Here it is.

Last October--the--"

She caught the words from him. "The 20th, wasn't it?" With a

sharp look at her, he verified. "Yes, the 20th. Then you DID

know?"

"I know now." Her white stare continued to travel past him.

"Sunday, the 20th--that was the day he came first."

Parvis's voice was almost inaudible. "Came HERE first?"

"Yes."

"You saw him twice, then?"

"Yes, twice." She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. "He

came first on the 20th of October. I remember the date because

it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time." She

felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for

that she might have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her

gaze.

"We saw him from the roof," she went on. "He came down the lime-

avenue toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that

picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran

down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished."

"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.

"Yes." Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. "I

couldn't think what had happened. I see now. He TRIED to come

then; but he wasn't dead enough--he couldn't reach us. He had to

wait for two months; and then he came back again--and Ned went

with him."

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has

successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she

lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her

bursting temples.

"Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent

him to this room!" she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward

falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if

through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her.

But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was

saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the

voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

"You won't know till afterward," it said. "You won't know till

long, long afterward."

The End of Afterward