Front matter (continued 3)

“No getaway there, Boss—straight drop—” he said.

Warner was speaking again.

“Your landlady says we may have her parlor for our conference. Wouldn’t you prefer to make yourself presentable for the street and then join us there—in about ten minutes, say?”

Ten minutes—this gave her a chance to play for time—the only chance she had. She looked up. Nothing on the clean-cut, pearl-white exterior of her face gave a clue to the anarchy within; nothing, even, in her black-fringed, blue gaze the tautly-held scarlet lips. Her fire-bright head lifted a little higher and she gazed steadily into Warner’s eyes, as she spoke in a voice which seemed to her to belong to someone else:

“I can give you a few minutes, but I have not changed my determination.”

“But I think you will,” said Warner. “I really think you will. Before we go, I might remind you that we have been extremely gentle and patient with you, Miss Ayer. I might also remind you that you have never succeeded in giving us the slip. You were very clever when you escaped from your last lodging. We don’t know yet exactly how you did it. Perhaps you will tell us in the course of our little talk this afternoon. But you were not quite clever enough. You did not figure that with such important matters pending, we would have the outside of the house watched as well as the inside. So that you may not think our meeting this afternoon is accidental, let me remind you that you have an engagement for tomorrow afternoon in Jamaica—to take a job as second maid. What we have to offer you this afternoon will probably be so attractive that you will overlook that engagement.”

He paused.

“I will be with you in ten minutes,” said Susannah. She was conscious of no emotion now—only that her head ached, and that the faded roses in the old carpet were entwined with forget-me-nots—a thing she had never noticed before.

“Thank you.” Warner made her a gallant little bow. “Mr. Byan and I will wait in the parlor. Until we come to an understanding, we shall have to continue the old arrangement. It will therefore be necessary for Mr. O’Hearn to watch in the hall. If you do not arrive in ten minutes—this room will probably do as well as the parlor. Until then, Miss Ayer!”

He opened the door, passed out. Byan retreated after him, flashing one of his pathetically sweet, floating smiles. Susannah looked up now, followed their movements as the felon must follow the movements of the man with the rope. O’Hearn had been standing close to Susannah, his veiling lashes down. He fell in behind the other two. But before he joined the file, those lashes came up in a quick glance which stabbed Susannah. His hand came up too. He was pointing to the window. And then he spoke two words in a whisper so low that they carried only to the ears of Susannah, scarce three feet away—so low that she could not have made them out but for the exaggerated, expressive movement of his lips.

“Skylight—quick—” he said. He made for the door in the wake of the other two.

For the fraction of an instant Susannah did not comprehend. And then suddenly one of those little intuitive blows which she was always receiving and ignoring gave, on the hard surface of her mind, a faint tap. This time, she was conscious of it. This time, she trusted it instantly. This time, it told her what to do.

“I’ll be with you as soon as I get dolled up,” she called.

“That’s right,” came the suave voice of Warner from the hall.

She closed the door. She listened while two sets of footsteps descended the stairs. She heard a third set, which must be O’Hearn’s, retreat for a few paces and then stop. She fell swiftly to work. She put on her hat and cape. She took the miniature, thumbtack and all, from the wall, and put it in her wrist bag. “Help me, Glorious Lutie,” she called from the depths of her soul. “Help me! Help me! Help me! I’m lost if you don’t help me! I can’t do it any more alone.”

VII

When Lindsay pulled back from the quiet gray void which had enshrouded him, he was lying on the grass. Far, far away, as though pasted against the brilliant blue sky, was a face. Gradually the sky receded. The face came nearer. It topped, he gradually gathered, the tiny slender black-silk figure of a little old lady. “Do you feel all right now?” it asked.

Lindsay wished that she would not question him. He was immensely preoccupied with what seemed essentially private matters. But the instinct of courtesy prodded him. “Very much, thank you,” he answered weakly. He closed his eyes again. He became conscious of a wet cloth sopping his forehead and cheeks. A breeze tingled on the bare flesh of his neck and chest. He opened his eyes again; sat up. “Do you mean to tell me I fainted?” he demanded with his customary vigor.

“That’s exactly what you did, young man,” the old lady answered. “The instant you looked at me! I was setting with my back to the door. You could have knocked me down with a feather, when you fell over backwards.”

“Have I been out long?”

“Not more’n a moment. I flaxed around and got some water and brought you to in a jiffy. You ain’t an invalid, are you?”

“Far from it,” Lindsay reassured her. “I’m afraid, though, I’ve been working too long in the hot sun this morning.”

“Like as not!” the little old lady agreed briskly. “I guess you’re hungry too,” she hazarded. “Now you just get up and lay in the hammock and I’m going to make you some lunch. I see there was some eggs there and milk and tea. I’ll have you some scrambled eggs fixed in no time. My name is Spash—Mrs. Spash.”

“My name is Lindsay—David Lindsay.”

Lindsay found himself submitting without a murmur to the little old lady’s program. He lay quiescent in the hammock and let the tides of vitality flow back.... Mrs. Spash’s prophecy, if anything, underestimated her energy. In an incredibly short time she had produced, in collaboration with the oil stove, eggs scrambled on bread deliciously toasted, tea of a revivifying heat and strength.

“Gee, that tastes good!” Lindsay applauded. He sighed. “It certainly takes a woman!”

“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Spash inquired. “Batching it?”

“Yes, I think that describes the process,” Lindsay admitted. After an instant, “How did you happen to be on the doorstep?”

“Well, I don’t wonder you ask,” Mrs. Spash declared. “I didn’t know the Murray place was let and—well, I was making one of my regular visits. You see, I come here often. I’m pretty fond of this old house. I lived here once for years.”

Lindsay sat upright. “Did you by chance live here when Lutetia Murray was alive?”

“Well, I should say I did!” Mrs. Spash answered. “I lived here the last twenty years of Lutetia Murray’s life. I was her housekeeper, as you might say.”

Lindsay stared at her. He started to speak. It was obvious that conflicting comments fought for expression, but all he managed to say—and ineptly enough—was: “Oh, you knew her, then?”

“Knew her!” Mrs. Spash seemed to search among her vocabulary for words. Or perhaps it was her soul for emotions. “Yes, I knew her,” she concluded with a feeble breathlessness.

“You’ve lived in this house, then, for twenty years,” Lindsay repeated, musing.

“Yes, all of that.” Mrs. Spash appeared to muse also. For an instant the two followed their own preoccupations. Then as though they led them to the same impasse, their eyes lifted simultaneously; met. They smiled.

“I’ve bought this house, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay confided. “And you never can guess why.”

Mrs. Spash started what appeared to be a comment. It deteriorated into a little inarticulate murmur.

“I bought it,” Lindsay went on, “because when I was in college, I fell in love with Lutetia Murray.” And then, at Mrs. Spash’s wide-eyed, faded stare, “Not with Miss Murray herself—I never saw her—but with her books. I read everything she wrote and I wrote in college what we call a thesis on her.”

“Sort of essay or composition,” Mrs. Spash defined thesis to herself.

“Exactly,” Lindsay permitted.

“She was—she was—” Mrs. Spash began in a dispassionate sort of way. She concluded in a kind of frenzy. “She was an angel.”

“Oh yes, she’s that all right. I have never seen anybody so lovely.”

Mrs. Spash made a swift conversational pounce. “I thought you said you’d never seen her.”

Lindsay flushed abjectly. “No,” he admitted. “But you see I have a picture of her.” He pointed to the mantel.

“Yes, I noticed that when I came in to get some water.” Strangely enough Mrs. Spash did not, for a moment, look at the picture. Instead she stared at Lindsay. Lindsay submitted easily enough to this examination. After a while Mrs. Spash appeared to abandon her scrutiny of him. She trotted over to the fireplace; studied Lutetia’s likeness.

“I don’t know as I ever see that one—it don’t half do her justice—I hate a profile picture—” She pronounced “profile” to rhyme with “wood-pile.” “None of her pictures ever did do her justice. Her beauty was mostly in her hair and her eyes. She had a beautiful skin too, though she never took no care of it. Never wore a hat—no matter how hot the sun was. And then her expression— Well, it was just beautiful—changing all the time.”

Lindsay was only half listening. He was, with an amused glint in his eyes, studying Mrs. Spash’s spare, erect black-silk figure. She was a relic perfectly preserved, he reflected, of mid-Victorianism. Her black was of the kind that is accurately described by the word decent. And she wore fittingly a little black, beaded cape with a black shade-hat that tilted forward over her face at a decided slant. Her straight, white, abundant hair was apparently parted in the middle under her hat. At any rate, the neat white parting continued over the crown of her head to her very neck, where it concealed itself under a flat black-silk bow. Her gnarled, blue-veined hands had been covered with the lace mitts that now lay on the table. Her little wrinkled face was neat-featured. The irises of her eyes were a faded blue and the whites were blue also; and this put a note of youthful color among her wrinkles.

But Lindsay lost interest in these details; for, obviously, a new idea caught him in its instant clutch. “Oh, Mrs. Spash,” he suggested, “would you be so good as to take me through this house? I want you to tell me who occupied the rooms. This is not mere idle curiosity on my part. You see Miss Murray’s publishers have decided to bring out a new edition of her works. They want me to write a life of Miss Murray. I’m asking everybody who knows anything about her all kinds of questions.”

Mrs. Spash received all this with that unstirred composure which indicates non-comprehension of the main issue.

“Of course I’m interested on my own account too,” Lindsay went on. “She’s such a wonderful creature, so charming and so beautiful, so sweet, so unbearably poignant and sad. I can’t understand,” he concluded absently, “why she is so sad.”

Mrs. Spash seemed to comprehend instantly. “It’s the way she died,” she explained vaguely, “and how everything was left!” She walked in little swift pattering steps, and with the accustomed air of one who knows her way, through the side door into the addition. “This was Miss Murray’s own living-room,” she told Lindsay. “She had that little bit of a stairway made, she said, so’s too many folks couldn’t come up to her room at once. Not that that made any difference. Wherever she was, the whole household went.”

With little nipping steps Mrs. Spash ascended the stairway. Lindsay followed.

“Did Miss Murray die in her room?” Lindsay asked.

“How did you know this was her room?” Mrs. Spash demanded.

“I don’t know exactly. I just guessed it,” Lindsay answered. “I sleep here myself,” he hurriedly threw off.

“Yes. She died here. She was all alone when she died. You see—" Mrs. Spash sat down on the one chair and, instantly sensing her mood, Lindsay sat down on the bed.

“You see, things hadn’t gone very well for Miss Murray the last years of her life. Her books didn’t sell— And she spent money like water. She was allus the most open-hearted, open-handed creature you can imagine. She allus had the house full of company! And then there was the little girl—Cherry—who lived with her. At the end, things were bad. No money coming in. And Miss Murray sick all the time.”

“You say she was alone when she died,” Lindsay gently brought her back to the track.

“Yes—except for little Cherry, who slept right through everything—childlike. Cherry had that room.” Mrs. Spash jerked an angular thumb back.

Lindsay nodded. “Yes, I guessed that—with all the drawings—”

“The Weejubs! Mr. Gale drew them pictures for Cherry. He was an artist. He used to paint pictures out in the backyard there. I didn’t fancy them very much myself—too dauby. You had to stand way off from them ’fore they’d look like anything a-tall. But he used to get as high as five hundred dollars for them. Oh, what excitement there was in this house while he was decorating Cherry’s room! And little Cherry chattering like a magpie! Mr. Gale made up a whole long story about the Weejubs on her walls. Lord, I’ve forgotten half of it; but Cherry could rattle it all off as fast. Miss Murray had that door between her room and Cherry’s made small on purpose. She said Cherry could come into her room whenever she wanted to, as long as she was a little girl. But when Cherry grew up, she was going to make it hard for her. But she promised when Cherry was sixteen years old she shouldn’t have to call her auntie any more—she could call her jess Lutetia. Queer idea, worn’t it?”

Mrs. Spash’s old eyes so narrowed before an oncoming flood of reminiscence that they seemed to retreat to the back of her head, where they diminished to blue sparks. For a moment the room was silent. Then “Let me show you something! You’d oughter know it, seein’ it’s your house. There’s some, though, I wouldn’t show it to.”

She pattered with her surprising quickness to the back wall. She pressed a spot in the paneling and a small square of the wood moved slowly back.

“You see, Miss Murray’s bed ran along that wall, just as Cherry’s did in the other room. Mornings and evenings they used to open this panel and talk to each other.”

Lindsay’s eyes filmed even as Mrs. Spash’s had. Mentally he saw the two faces bending toward the opening....

“But you was asking about Miss Murray’s death— As I say, things didn’t go well with her. I didn’t understand how it all happened. Folks stopped buying her books, I guess. Anyway, when she died, there was nothing left. And there was debts. The house and everything in it was sold—at auction. It was awful to see Miss Murray’s things all out on the lawn. And a great crowd of gawks—riff-raff from everywhere—looking at ’em and making fun of ’em— She had beautiful things, but they went for nothing a-tall. They jess about paid her debts.”

Lindsay groaned. “But her death—”

“Oh yes, as I was sayin’. You see, Miss Murray worn’t ever the same after Mr. Lewis died. You know about that?”

Lindsay nodded. “He was drowned.”

Mrs. Spash nodded confirmatively. “Yes, in Spy Pond—over South Quinanog way. He was swimming all alone. He was taken with cramps way out in the middle of the Pond. Finally somebody saw him struggling and they put out in a boat, but they were too late. Miss Murray was in the garden when they brought him back on a shutter. I was with her. I can see the way her face looked now. She didn’t say anything. Not a word! She turned to stone. And it didn’t seem to me that she ever came back to flesh again. They was to be married in October. He was a splendid man. He came from New York.”

“Yes. Curiously enough I spent a few days in what used to be his rooms,” Lindsay informed her.

“That so?” But it was quite apparent that nothing outside the radius of Quinanog interested Mrs. Spash deeply. She made no further comment.

“Was she very much in love with Lewis?” Lindsay ventured.

“In love! I wish you could see their eyes when they looked at each other. They’d met late. Miss Murray had always had lots of attention. But she never seemed to care for anybody—though she’d flirt a little—until she met Mr. Lewis. It was love at first sight with them.”

She proceeded.

“Well, Miss Murray died five years after Mr. Lewis. She died—well, I don’t know exactly what it was. But she had attacks. She was a terrible sufferer. And she was worried—money matters worried her. You see, little Cherry’s mother died when she was born and her father soon after. Miss Murray’d always had Cherry and felt responsible for her. I know, because she told me. ‘It ain’t myself, Eunice Spash,’ she said to me more’n once. ‘It’s little Cherry.’ Anyway, she was alone when her last attack came. She’d sent for a cousin—I forget the name—to be with her, and she was up in Boston getting a nurse, and I was in the other side of the house. I never heard a sound. We found her dead in the middle of the floor—there.” Her crooked forefinger indicated the spot. “Seemed she’d got up and tried to get to the door to call. But she dropped and died halfway. She was all contorted. Her face looked—Not so much suffering of the body as— Well, you could see it in her face that it come to her that she was going, and Cherry was left with nothing.”

“What became of that cousin?” Lindsay inquired. “I have asked everybody in the neighborhood, but nobody seems to know.”

“And I don’t know. She went to Boston, taking Cherry with her. For a time we heard from Cherry now and then—she’d write letters to the children. Then we lost sight of her. I don’t know whether Miss Murray’s cousin’s living or dead; Cherry either.”

Lindsay felt that he could have assured her that Cherry was alive; but his conclusion rested on premises too gauzy for him to hazard the statement.

Mrs. Spash sighed. She arose, led the way into the hall. “This was Mr. Monroe’s room; and Mr. Gale’s room was back of his. He liked the room that overlooked the garden. Mr. Monroe—”

“That’s the big man, the sculptor,” Lindsay hazarded.

“How’d you know?” Mrs. Spash pounced on him again.

“Oh, I’ve talked with a lot of people in the neighborhood,” Lindsay returned evasively.

“That Mr. Monroe,” Mrs. Spash glided on easily, “was a case and a half. Nothing but talk and laugh every moment he was in the house. I used to admire to have him come.”

“Where is he?” Lindsay asked easily. He hoped Mrs. Spash did not guess how, mentally, he hung upon her answer.

“He went to Italy—to Florence—after Miss Murray died.” Mrs. Spash stopped. “He was in love with Miss Murray. Had been for years. She wouldn’t have him though. He was an awful nice man. Sometimes I thought she would have him. But after Mr. Lewis came— Queer, worn’t it? I don’t know whether Mr. Monroe’s alive or dead.”

Again Lindsay felt that he could have assured her that he was alive, but again gauzy premises inhibited exact conclusions.

“The last I heard of him he was in Rome. ’Tain’t likely he’s alive now. Land, no! He’d be well over seventy—close onto seventy-five. Mr. Gale was in love with her too. He was younger. I don’t think he ever told Miss Murray, I never did know if she knew. You couldn’t fool me though. Well, I started out to show you this house. I must be gitting on. You’ve seen the slave quarters and the whipping-post upstairs?”

“Yes. Everybody could tell me about the whipping-post and the slave quarters. But the things I wanted to know—”

“Well, it’s natural enough that folks shouldn’t know much about her. Miss Murray was a lady that didn’t talk about her own affairs and she kept sort of to herself, as you might say. She wasn’t the kind that ran in on folks. She wrote by fits and starts. Sometimes she’d stay up late at night. She allus wrote new-moon time. She said the light of the crescent moon inspired her. How they used to make fun of her about that! But she’d write with all of them about, laughing and talking and playing the piano or singing—and dancing even. The house was so lively those days—they was all great trainers. And yet she could fall asleep right in the midst of all that confusion. Well—so you see she wasn’t given to making calls. And then there was always so much to do and so many folks around at home. Have you been upstairs in the barn?”

“No—not yet. The stairs were all broken away. I had just finished mending them when I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance.”

They both smiled reminiscently.

“Let’s go up there now—there must be a lot of things—” She ended her sentence a little vaguely as the old sometimes do. But the movement with which she arose from her chair and trotted toward the stairs was full of an anticipation almost youthful.

“The garden used to be so pretty,” she sighed as they started on the well-worn trail to the barn. “Miss Murray worn’t what you might call practical, but she could make flowers grow. She never cooked, nor sewed, nor anything sensible, but she’d work in that garden till— There was certain combinations of flowers that she used to like; hollyhocks, especially the garnet ones so dark they was almost black, surrounded by them blue Canterbury bells; and then phlox in all colors, white and pink and magenta and lavender and purple. I think there was some things put out here,” she interrupted herself vaguely, “that nobody wanted at the auction. There wasn’t even a bid on them.”

She trotted up the stairs like a pony that has suddenly become aged. Lindsay followed, two steps at a time. The upper story of the barn was the confused mass of objects that the lumber room of any large household inevitably collects. Broken chairs; tables, bureaux; rejected pieces of china; kitchen furnishings; a rusty stove, old boxes; bandboxes; broken trunks; torn bags.

“There! That’s the table Miss Murray used to do her writing at. She said there never had been a table built big enough for her. I expect that’s why nobody bought it at the auction. ’Twas too big for mortal use, you might say. The same reason I expect is why the dining-room table didn’t sell either.”

“Where did she write?” Lindsay asked, measuring the table with his eye.

“All summer in the south living-room. But when it come winter, she’d often take her things and set right in front of the fire in the living-room. Then she’d write at that long table you’re writing on.”

“This table goes back to the south living-room tomorrow,” Lindsay decided almost inaudibly. “Can you tell me the exact spot?”

“I guess I can. Lord knows I’ve got down on my hands and knees and dusted the legs often enough. Miss Murray said, though it was soft wood, it was the oldest piece in the house. She bought it at some old tavern where they was having a sale. She said it dated back—long before Revolutionary times—to Colonial days.”

“Could you tell me, I wonder, about the rest of Miss Murray’s furniture?” Lindsay came suddenly from out a deep revery. “Do you remember who bought it? I would like to buy back all that I can get. I’d like to make the old place look, as much as possible, as it used to look.”

Mrs. Spash flashed him a quick intent look. Then she meditated. “I think I could probably tell you where most every piece went. The Drakes got the Field bed and the ivory-keyhole bureau and the ivory-keyhole desk; and Miss Garnet got the elephant and Mis’ Manson got the gazelles—”

“Elephant! Gazelles!” Lindsay interrupted.

“The gazelles,” Mrs. Spash smiled indulgently. “Well, it does sound queer, but Miss Murray used to call those little thin-legged candle tables that folks use, gazelles. The elephant was a great high chest of drawers. Mis’ Manson got the maple gazelles—” She proceeded in what promised to be an indefinite category.

“Do you think I could buy any of those things back?” Lindsay asked after listening patiently to the end.

“Some of them, I guess. I have a few things in my attic I’ll sell you—and some I’ll give you. I’d admire to see them in the old place once more.”

“You must let me buy them all,” Lindsay protested.

“Well, we’ll see about that,” Mrs. Spash disposed of this disagreement easily. “Have you seen the Dew Pond yet?”

“The Dew Pond!” Lindsay echoed.

“The little pond beyond the barn,” Mrs. Spash explained. Then, as though a great light dawned, “Oh, of course it’s all so growed up round it you’d never notice it. Come and I’ll show it to you.”

Lindsay followed her out of the barn. This was all like a dream, he reflected—but then everything was like a dream nowadays. He had lived in a dream for two months now. Mrs. Spash struck into a path which led beyond the barn.

The trail grew narrower and narrower; threatened after a while to disappear. Lindsay finally took the lead, broke a path. They came presently on a pond so tiny that it was not a pond at all; it was a pool. Water-lilies choked it; forget-me-nots bordered it; high wild roses screened it.

Lindsay stood looking for a long time into it. “It’s the Merry Mere of Mary Towle,” he meditated aloud. Mrs. Spash received this in the uninterrogative silence with which she had received other of his confidences. She apparently fell back easily into the ways of literary folk.

“I remember now I got a glint of water from one of the upstairs bedrooms,” Lindsay went on, “the first time I came into the house. But I forgot it instantly; and I’ve never noticed it since.”

“Wait a moment!” Mrs. Spash seemed afraid that he would leave. “There’s something else.” She attempted to push her way through the jungle in the direction of the house. For an instant her progress was easy, then bushes and vines caught her. Lindsay sprang to her assistance.

“There’s something here—that was left,” she panted. “Folks have forgotten all about—” She dropped explanatory phrases.

Heedless of tearing thorns and piercing prickers, Lindsay crashed on. Mrs. Spash watched expectantly.

“There!” she called with satisfaction.

On a cairn of rocks, filmed over by years of exposure to the weather, stood what Lindsay immediately recognized to be a large old rum-jar. The sun found exposed spots on its surface, brought out its rich olive color.

“After Mr. Lewis died,” Mrs. Spash explained, “Miss Murray went abroad for a year. She went to Egypt. She put this here when she came home. Then you could see it from the house. The sun shone on it something handsome. She told me once she went into a temple on the Nile cut out of the living-rock, where there was room after room, one right back of the other. In the last one, there was an altar; and once a year, the first ray of the rising sun would strike through all the rooms and lay on that altar. Worn’t that cute? I allus thought she had that in mind when she put this here.”

Lindsay contemplated the old rum-jar. Mrs. Spash contemplated him. And suddenly it was as though she were looking at Lindsay from a new point of view.

Lindsay’s face had changed subtly in the last two months. The sun of Quinanog had added but little to the tan and burn with which three years of flying had crusted it. He was still very handsome. It was not, however, this comeliness that Mrs. Spash seemed to be examining. The experiences at Quinanog had softened the deliberate stoicism of his look. Rather they had fed some inner softness; had fired it. His air was now one of perpetual question. Yet dreams often invaded his eyes; blurred them; drooped his lips.

“It’s all unbelievable,” Lindsay suddenly commented, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe myself.”

Mrs. Spash still kept her eyes fixed on the young man’s face. Her look had grown piercing.

“Have you a shovel handy?” she surprisingly asked.

“Yes, why?”

Mrs. Spash did not answer immediately. He turned and looked at her. She was still gazing at him hard; but the light from some long-harbored emotion of her dulled old soul was shining bluely in her dulled old eyes.

“I want you should get it,” she ordered briefly. “There’s something right here,” she pointed, “that I want you to dig up.”

VIII

Susannah let herself lightly down on the tin roof; it was scarcely a step from her window. With deliberate caution, she turned and drew the shade. Then she tiptoed toward the skylight. The workmen were still soldering; the older man, with the air of one performing a delicate operation, lay stretched out flat, holding some kind of receptacle; the younger was pouring molten lead from a ladle. Try as she might, she could not prevent her feet from making a slight tapping on the tin. The older man glanced sharply up. “Look out!” called the younger, and he bent again to his work. Almost running now, she stepped into the gaping hole of the skylight. The stairs were very steep—practically a ladder. As she disappeared from view, she heard a quick “What the hell!” from the roof above her.

Susannah hurried forward along a dark passage, looking for stairs. The passage jutted, became lighter, went forward again. This must be the point where the shed-addition joined the main building. She was in the hallway of a dingy, conventional flat-house, with doors to right and left. One of these doors opened; a woman in a faded calico dress looked her over, the glance including the traveling-bag; then picked up a letter from the hall-floor, and closed it again. Susannah found herself controlling an impulse to run. But no steps sounded behind her—she was not as yet pursued. And there was the stairway—at the very front of the house! She descended the two flights to the entrance. There, for a moment, she paused. As soon as Warner discovered her flight, they would be after her. The workmen would point the way. The street—and quick—was the only chance. Noiselessly she opened the door. At the head of the steps leading to the street, she stopped long enough for a look to right and left. Only a scattered afternoon crowd—no Warner, no Byan. An Eighth Avenue tram-car was ringing its gong violently. On a sudden impulse of safety, she shot down the steps, ran past her own door to the corner. An open southbound car had drawn up, was taking on passengers. She reached it just as the conductor was about to give the forward signal, and was almost jerked off her feet as she stepped onto the platform. Steadying herself, she looked, in the brief moment afforded by the bumpy crossing of the car, down the side street.

The entrances of her own house at the corner, the entrances to the house she had just left, were blank and undisturbed; no one was following her. She paid her fare, and settled down on the end of a cross-seat.

And now she was aware not of relief or reaction or fear, but solely of her headache. It had changed in character. It had become a furious internal bombardment of her brows. If she turned her eyes to right or left, she seemed to be dragging weights across the front of her brain. Yet this headache did not seem quite a part of herself. It was as though she knew, by a supernormal sensitiveness, the symptoms of someone else. It was as though suddenly she had become two people. Anyway, it had ceased to be personal. And somewhere else within her head was growing a delicious feeling of freedom, of lightness, of escape from a wheel. Her evasion of the Carbonado Mining Company did not account for all that; she felt free from everything. “I’m not going to take any more rooms,” she said to herself. “I’m going to sleep out of doors now, like the birds. People find you when you take rooms. Where shall I begin?” She considered; and then one of those little hammers of intuition seemed to tap on her brain. Again, she did not resist. “Why, Washington Square of course!” she said to herself.

The car was threading now the narrow ways of Greenwich Village. It stopped; Susannah stepped off. The rest seemed for a long time to be just wandering. But that curious sense of duality had vanished. She was one person again. She did not find Washington Square easily; but then, it made no difference whether she ever found it. For New York and the world were so amusing when once you were free! You could laugh at everything—the passing crowds, surging as though business really mattered; the Carbonado Mining Company; the grisly old fool in their toils, and Susannah Ayer. You could laugh even at the climate—for sometimes it seemed very hot, which was right in summer, and sometimes cold, which wasn’t right at all. You could laugh at the headache, when it tied ridiculous knots in your forehead. There was the Arch—Washington Square at last.

But it wasn’t time to sleep in Washington Square yet. The birds hadn’t gone to bed. Sparrows were still pecking and squabbling along the borders of the flower-beds. Besides, New York was still flowing, on its homeward surge from office and workshop, down the paths. Susannah sat down on a bench and considered. She had a disposition to stay there—why was she so weak? Oh, of course she hadn’t eaten. People always had dinner before going to bed. She must eat—and she had money. She shook out her pocketbook into her lap. A ten-dollar bill, a one-dollar bill, and some small change. She must dine gloriously—free creatures always did that when they had money. Besides, she was never going to pay any more room rent. Susannah rose, strolled up Fifth Avenue. The crowd was thinning out. That was pleasant, too. She disliked to get out of the way of people. She was crossing Twenty-third Street now; and now she was before the correct, white façade of the Hague House. A proper and expensive place for dinner.

Susannah found it very hard to speak to the waiter. It was like talking to someone through a partition. It seemed difficult even to move her lips; they felt wooden.

“A petite marmite, please; then I’ll see what more I want,” she heard herself saying at last.

But when the petite marmite came, steaming in its big, red casserole, she found herself quite disinclined to eat—almost unable to eat. She managed only two or three mouthfuls of the broth; then dallied with the beef. Perhaps it was because instantly—and for no reason whatever—she had become two people again. Perhaps it was because she had been drinking so much ice-water. It couldn’t be because H. Withington Warner was sitting at the next table to the right. It couldn’t be that—because she had told him, when first she saw him sitting there, that she was no longer afraid of the Carbonado Company. And indeed, when she turned to the left and saw him sitting there also—when by degrees she discovered that there was one of him at every table in the room, she thought of Alice in the Trial Scene in Wonderland, and became as contemptuous as Alice. “After all,” she said, “you’re only a pack of cards.”

With a flourish, the waiter set the dinner-card before her, asking: “What will you have next, Madame?” Oh yes, she was dining!

“I think I can’t eat any more—the bill, please,” she heard one of her selves saying. That self, she discovered, took calm cognizance of everything about her; listened to conversation. As the waiter turned his back, that half of her saw that Mr. Warner wasn’t there any more; neither at the table on her right, nor anywhere. But when she had paid the bill, tipped, and risen to go, the other self discovered that he was back again at every table; and that with every Warner was a Byan and an O’Hearn. “I am snapping my fingers at them, though nobody sees it,” she said to both her selves. “I can’t imagine how they ever troubled me so much. They don’t know what I’m doing! I’m sleeping out of doors; they can find me only in rooms!” As though staggered by her complete composure, not one of this triplicate multitude of enemies followed her outside.

“Now I’ll go to Washington Square,” she said, realizing that her personalities had merged again. “The birds must be in bed.” She took a bus; and sank into languor and that curious, impersonal headache until the conductor, calling “All out,” at the south terminus, recalled to her that she was going somewhere. “I must have been asleep,” she thought. “Isn’t this a wonderful world?”

The long, early summer twilight was just beginning to draw about the world. The day lingered though—in an exquisite luminousness. All around her the city was grappling tentatively with oncoming dusk. On a few of the passing limousines, the front lamps struck a garish note. Near, the Fifth Avenue lights were like slowly burning bonfires in the trees; in the distance, seemingly suspended by chains so delicate that they were invisible, they diminished to pots of gold. The six-o’clock rush had long ago ceased. Now everyone sauntered; for everyone was freshly caparisoned for the wonderful night glories of midsummer Manhattan.

Susannah sat down on a bench in Washington Square and surveyed this free world. Though her eyes burned, they saw crystal-clear. All about her Italian-town mixed democratically with Greenwich Village; made contrasting color and noise. Fat Italian mothers, snatching the post-sunset breezes, chattered from bench to bench while they nursed babies. On other benches, lovers clasped hands. Children played over the grass. The birds twittered and the trees murmured. Every color darted pricklingly distinct to Susannah’s avid eyes, burning and heavy though it was. Every sound came distinct to her avid ears, though it sounded through a ringing.

The Fifth Avenue busses were clumping and lumbering in swift succession to their stopping-places. How much, Susannah thought, they looked like prehistoric beetles; colossally big; armored to an incredible hardness and polish. And, already, roped-off crowds of people were patiently waiting upstairs seats. As each bus stopped, there came momentary scramble and confusion until inside and out they filled up. She watched this process for a long, long time.

“I can’t go to sleep yet,” she said to herself finally, “the people won’t let me. One can’t sleep in this wonderful world. Where does one go after dinner? Oh, to the theater, of course! On Broadway!” She found herself drifting, happily though languorously, through the arch and northward.

Twilight had settled down; had become dusk; had become night. New York was so brilliant that it almost hurt. It was deep dusk and yet the atmosphere was like a purple river flowing between stiff cañon-like buildings. Everywhere in that purple river glittered golden lights. And, floating through it, were mermaids and mermen of an extreme beauty. Susannah passed from Fifth Avenue to Broadway. She stopped under one of the most brilliant palace-fronts of light, and bought a ticket in the front row. The curtain was just rising on the second act of a musical comedy. Susannah would have been hazy about the plot anyway, for the simple reason that there was no plot. But tonight she was peculiarly hazy, because she enjoyed the dancing so much that she became oblivious to everything else. Indeed, at times she seemed to be dancing with the dancers. The illusion was so complete that she grew dizzy; and clung to the arm of her seat. She did not want to divide into two people again.

After a while, though, this sensation disappeared in a more intriguing one. For suddenly she discovered that the audience consisted entirely of her and the Carbonado Mining Company. H. Withington Warners, by the hundred, filled the orchestra seats. Byans, by the score, filled the balcony. O’Hearns, by the dozen, filled the gallery. But this did not perturb her. “You’re only a pack of cards,” she accused them mentally. And she stayed to the very end.

“I thought so,” she remarked contemptuously as she turned to go out. For the Carbonado Mining Company had vanished into thin air. She was the only real person who left the theater.

When she came out on the street again, her headache had stopped and the languor was over. There was a beautiful lightness to her whole body. That lightness impelled her to walk with the crowd. But—she suddenly discovered—she was not walking. She was floating. She even flew—only she did not rise very high. She kept an even level, about a foot above the pavement; but at that height she was like a feather. And in a wink—how this extraordinary division happened, she could not guess—she was two people once more.

New York was again blooming; but this time with its transient, vivacious after-the-theater vividness. Crowds were pouring up; pouring down, deflecting into side streets; emerging from side streets. Everywhere was light. Taxicabs and motors raced and spun and backed and turned; they churned, sizzled, spluttered, and foamed—scattering light. Tram-cars, the low-set, armored cruisers of Broadway, flashed smoothly past, overbrimming with light. The tops of the buildings held great congregations of dancing stars. Light poured down their sides.

Susannah floated with the strong main current of the crowd up Broadway and then, with a side current, a little down Broadway. Eddies took her into Forty-second Street, and whirled her back. And all the time she was in the crowd, but not of it—she was above it. She was looking down on people—she could see the tops of their heads. Susannah kept chuckling over an extraordinary truth she discovered.

“I must remember to tell Glorious Lutie,” she said to herself, “how few people ever brush their hats.”

While one self was noting this amusing fact, however, the other was listening to conversations; the snatches of talk that drifted up to her.

“Let’s go to a midnight show somewhere,” a peevish wife-voice suggested.

“No, sir!” a gruff husband-voice answered. “Li’l’ ole beddo looks pretty good to muh. I can’t hit the hay too soon.”

“What’s Broadway got on Market Street?” a blithe boy’s voice demanded. “Take the view from Twin Peaks at night. Why, it has Broadway beat forty ways from the jack.”

“I’ll say so!” a girl’s voice agreed.

Theaters were empty now, but restaurants were filling. In an incredibly short time, this phantasmagoria of movement, this kaleidoscope of color, this hurly-burly of sound had shattered, melted, fallen to silence. People disappeared as though by magic from the street; now there were great gaps of sidewalk where nobody appeared. Susannah—both of her, because now she seemed to have become two people permanently—felt lonely. She quickened her pace, her floating rather, to catch up with a figure ahead. It was a girl, just an everyday girl, in a white linen suit and a white sailor hat topping a mass of black hair. She carried a handbag. Susannah found herself following, step by step, behind this girl whose face she had as yet not seen. She was floating; yet every time she tried to see the top of that sailor hat her vision became blurred. It was annoying; but this stealthy pursuit was pleasant, somehow—satisfying.

“They’ve been shadowing me,” said Susannah to herself. “Now I’m shadowing. I’ve helped the Carbonado Company to rob orphans. I’m going to break my promise to go to Jamaica tomorrow. Isn’t it glorious to float and be a criminal!”

So she followed westward on Forty-second Street and reached the Public Library corner of Fifth Avenue, which stretched now deserted except where knots of people awaited the omnibusses. Such a knot had gathered on that corner. Suddenly the girl in white raised her hand, waved; a woman in a light-blue summer evening gown answered her signal from the crowd; they ran toward each other. They were going to have a talk. Susannah floated toward them. The air-currents made her a little wabbly—but wasn’t it fun, eavesdropping and caring not the least bit about manners!

“My train doesn’t start until one,” said the white linen suit. “It’s no use going back to my room—the night is so hot. I’ve been to the Summer Garden, and I’m killing time.”

“Oh,” asked blue dress, “did you sublet your room?”

“No,” said the white linen suit, “I’ll be gone for only a month, and I decided it wasn’t worth while. I’ll have it all ready when I get back. I’ve even left the key under the rug in the hall.”

“I wouldn’t ever do that!” came the voice of the blue dress.

“Well,” said the linen suit, “you know me! I always lose keys. I’m convinced that when I get to Boston, I shan’t have my trunk key! And there isn’t much to steal.”

“Still, I’d feel nervous if I were you.”

“I don’t see why. Nobody stays up on the top floor, where I am—that is, in the summer. All the other rooms are in one apartment, and the young man who lives there has been away for ages. The people on the ground floor own the house. I get the room for almost nothing by taking care of it and the hall. I haven’t seen anyone else on the floor since the man in the apartment went away. That’s why I love the place—you feel so independent!”

“I think I know the house,” said blue dress. “The old house with the fanlight entrance, isn’t it? Mary Merle used to have a ducky little flat on the second floor, didn’t she?”

“Yes—Number Fifty-seven and a Half—”

Susannah was floating down the Avenue now. But floating with more difficulty. Why was there effort about floating? And why did she keep repeating, “Number Fifty-seven and a Half, Washington Square, top floor, key under the rug?”

She met few people. A policeman stared at her for a moment, then turned indifferently away. How surprising that her floating made no impression upon him! But then, there was no law against floating! Once she drifted past H. Withington Warner, who was staring into a shop window. He did not see her. Susannah had to inhibit her chuckles when, floating a foot above his head, she realized for the first time that he dyed his hair. Why could she see that? He should have his hat on—or was she seeing through his hat?

She was passing under the arch into Washington Square. But she wasn’t floating any longer. She was dragging weights; she was wading through something like tar, which clung to her feet. She was coughing violently. She had been coughing for a long time. Night in New York was no longer beautiful; glorious. Tragic horrors were rasping in her head. There was Warner. And there was Byan. She could not snap her fingers at them now.... But she knew how to get away from them ... she must rest....

She cut off a segment of Washington Square, looking for a number. There was a fanlight; and, plain in the street lamps, seeming for a moment the only object in the world, the number “Fifty-seven and a Half.” The outer door gave to her touch. A dim point of gaslight burned in the hall. She floated again for a minute as she mounted the stairs.... She was before a door.... She was on her hands and knees fumbling under the rug.... She was dragging herself up by the door-knob....

The key opened the door.

Light, streaming from somewhere in the backyard areas, illuminated a wide white bed.

“I am sick, Glorious Lutie—I think I am very sick,” said Susannah. “Watch me, won’t you? Keep Warner out!” Fumbling in the bag, she drew out the miniature, set it up against the mirror on the bureau beside the bed—just where she could see it plainly in the shaft of light.

She locked the door. She lay down.

IX

Lindsay sat in the big living-room beside the refectory table. Mrs. Spash moved about the room dusting; setting its scanty furnishings to rights. On the long table before him was set out a series of tiny villages, some Chinese, some Japanese: little pink or green-edged houses in white porcelain; little thatched-roofed houses in brown adobe; pagodas; bridges; pavilions. Dozens of tiny figures, some on mules, others on foot, and many loaded with burdens walked the streets. A bit of looking-glass, here and there, made ponds. Ducks floated on them, and boats; queer Oriental-looking skiffs, manned by tiny, half-clad sailors; Chinese junks. In neighboring pastures, domestic animals grazed. Roosters, hens, chickens grouped in back areas.

“That’s just what Miss Murray used to do,” Mrs. Spash observed. “She’d play with them toys for hours at a time. And of course Cherry loved them more than anything in the house. That’s the reason I stole them and buried them.”

“How did you manage that exactly?” Lindsay asked.

“Oh, that was easy enough,” Mrs. Spash confessed cheerfully. “Between Miss Murray’s death and the auction, I was here a lot, fixing up. They all trusted me, of course. Those toys was all set out in little villages by the Dew Pond. Nobody knew that they were there. So I just did them up in tissue paper and put them in that big tin box and hid them in the bushes. One night late I came back and buried them. Folks didn’t think of them for a long time after the auction. You see, nobody had touched them during Miss Murray’s illness. And when they did remember them, they thought they had disappeared during the sale.” Mrs. Spash paused a moment. Her face assumed an expression of extreme disapproval. “Other things disappeared during the sale,” she accused, lowering her voice.

“Who took them?” Lindsay asked.

All the caution of the Yankee appeared in Mrs. Spash’s voice. “I don’t know as I’d like to say, because it isn’t a thing anybody can prove. I have my suspicions though.”

Lindsay did not continue these inquiries.

“Where did Miss Murray get all these toys?”

“Well, a lot of ’em came from China. Miss Murray had a great-uncle who was a sea-captain. He used to go on them long whaling voyages. He brought them to her different times. Miss Murray had played with them when she was a child, and so she liked to have little Cherry play with them. Sometimes they’d all go out to the Dew Pond—Miss Murray, Mr. Monroe, Mr. Gale, Mr. Lewis, and spend a whole afternoon laying them out in little towns—jess about as you’ve got ’em there. There was two little places on the shore that Miss Murray had all cut down, so’s the bushes wouldn’t be too tall. They useter call the pond the Pacific Ocean. One of them cleared places was the China coast and the other the Japanese coast. They’d stay there for hours, floating little boats back and forth from China to Japan. And how they’d laugh! I useter listen to their voices coming through the window. But then, the house was always full of laughter. It began at seven o’clock in the morning, when they got up, and it never stopped until—after midnight sometimes—when they went to bed. Oh, it was such a gay place in those days.”

Lindsay arose and stretched. But the stretching did not seem so much an expression of fatigue or drowsiness as the demand of his spirit for immediate activity of some sort. He sat down again instantly. Under his downcast lids, his eyes were bright. “These walls are soaked with laughter,” he remarked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Spash seemed to understand. “But there was tears too and plenty of them—in the last years.”

“I suppose there were,” Lindsay agreed. He did not speak for a moment; nor did Mrs. Spash. There came a silence so concentrated that the sunlight poured into it tangible gold. Then, outside a thick white cloud caught the sun in its woolly net. The world gloomed again.

“She’s sad still,” Lindsay dropped in absent comment.

“Yes,” Mrs. Spash agreed.

“I wonder what she wants?” Lindsay addressed this to himself. His voice was so low that perhaps Mrs. Spash did not hear it. At any rate she made no answer.

Another silence came.

Mrs. Spash finished her dusting. But she lingered. Lindsay still sat at the table; but his eyes had left the little villages arranged there. They went through the door and gazed out into the brilliant patch of sunlight on the grass. There spread under his eyes a narrow stretch of lawn, all sun-touched velvet; beyond a big crescent of garden. Low-growing zinnias in futuristic colors, high phlox in pastel colors; higher, Canterbury bells, deep blue; highest of all, hollyhocks, wine red. Beyond stretched further expanses of lawn. One tall, wide wine-glass elm spread a perfect circle of emerald shade. One low, thick copper-beech dropped an irregular splotch of luminous shadow. Beyond all this ran the gray, lichened stone wall. And beyond the stone wall came unredeemed jungle. Mrs. Spash began, all over again, to dust and to arrange the scanty furniture. After a while she spoke.

“Mr. Lindsay—”

Lindsay started abruptly.

“Mr. Lindsay—that time you fainted when you first saw me, setting out there on the door-stone, you remember—?”

Lindsay nodded.

“Well, who was you expecting to see?”

Lindsay, alert now as a wire spring, turned on her, not his eyes alone, nor his head; but his whole body. Mrs. Spash was looking straight at him. Their glances met midway. The old eyes pierced the young eyes with an intent scrutiny. The young eyes stabbed the old eyes with an intense interrogation. Lindsay did not answer her question directly. Instead he laughed.

“I guess I don’t have to answer you,” he declared. “I had seen her often then.... I had seen the others too.... I don’t know why you should have frightened me when they didn’t.... I think it was that I wasn’t expecting anything human.... I’ve seen them since.... They never frighten me.”

Mrs. Spash’s reply was simple enough. “I see them all the time.” She added, with a delicate lilt of triumph, “I’ve seen them for years—”

Lindsay continued to look at her—and now his gaze was somber; even a little despairing. “What do they want? What does she want?”

Mrs. Spash’s reply came instantly, although there were pauses in her words. “I don’t know. I’ve tried.... I can’t make out.” She accompanied these simple statements with a reinforcing decisive nod of her little head.

“I can’t guess either—I can’t conjecture— There’s something she wants me to do. She can’t tell me. And they’re trying to help her tell me. All except the little girl—”

“Do you see the little girl?” Mrs. Spash demanded. “Well, I declare! That’s very queer, I must say. I never see Cherry.”

“I wish I saw her oftener,” Lindsay laughed ruefully. “She doesn’t ask anything of me. She’s just herself. But the others—Gale—Monroe— My God! It’s killing me!” He laughed again, and this time with a real amusement.

Mrs. Spash interrupted his laughter. “Do you see Mr. Monroe?” she asked in a pleased tone. “Well, I declare! Aren’t you the fortunate creature. I never see him!”

“All the time,” Lindsay answered shortly. “If I could only get it. I feel so stupid, so incredibly gross and lumbering and heavy. I’d do anything—”

He arose and walked over to the picture of Lutetia Murray which still hung above the fireplace. He stared at her hard. “I’d do anything for her, if I could only find out what it was.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Spash admitted dispassionately, “that’s the thing everybody felt about her, they’d do anything for her. Not that she ever asked them to do anything—”

Lindsay began to pace the length of the long room. “What is happening? Has the old ramshackle time-machine finally broken a spring so that, in this last revolution, it hauls, out of the past, these pictures of two decades ago? Or is it that there are superimposed one on the other two revolving worlds—theirs and ours—and theirs or ours has stopped an instant, so that I can glance into theirs? I feel as though I were in the dark of a camera obscura gazing into their brightness. Or have those two years in the air permanently broken my psychology; so that through that rift I shall always have the power to look into strange worlds? Or am I just piercing another dimension?”

Mrs. Spash had been following him with her faded, calm old eyes. Apparently she guessed these questions were not addressed to her. She kept silence.

“I’ve racked my brain. I lie awake nights and tear the universe to pieces. I outguess guessing and outconjecture conjecture. My thoughts fly to the end of space. My wonder invades the very citadel of fancy. My surmises storm the last outpost of reality. But it beats me. I can’t get it.” Lindsay stopped. Mrs. Spash made no comment. Apparently her twenty years’ training among artists had prepared her for monologues of this sort. She listened; but it was obvious that she did not understand; did not expect to understand.

“Does she want me to stay here or go there?” Lindsay demanded of the air. “If here, what does she want me to do? If there—where is there? If there, what does she want me to do there? Is her errand concerned with the living or the dead? If the living, who? If the dead, who? Where to find them? How to find them?” He turned his glowing eyes on Mrs. Spash. “I only know two things. She wants me to do something. She wants me to do it soon. Oh, I suppose I know another thing— If I don’t do it soon, it will be too late.”

Mrs. Spash was still following him with her placid, blue, old gaze. “There, there!” she said soothingly. “Now don’t you get too excited, Mr. Lindsay. It’ll all come to you.”

“But how—” Lindsay objected. “And when—”

“I don’t know—but she’ll tell you somehow. She’s cute— She’s awful cute. You mark my words, she’ll find a way.”

“That’s the reason I don’t have you in the house yet, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay explained.

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me that,” Mrs. Spash announced, triumphant because of her own perspicuity.

“It’s only that I have a feeling that she can do it more easily if we’re alone. That’s why I send you home at night. She comes oftenest in the evening when I’m alone. They all do. Oh, it’s quite a procession some nights. They come one after another, all trying—” He paused. “Sometimes this room is so full of their torture that I— You know, it all began before I came here. It began in an apartment in New York. It was in Jeffrey Lewis’ old rooms. He tried to tell me first, you see.”

“Did you see Mr. Lewis there?” Mrs. Spash asked this as casually as though she had said, “Has the postman been here this morning?” She added, “I see him here.”

“No, I didn’t see him,” Lindsay explained grimly, “but I felt him. And, believe me, I knew he was there. He was the only one of the lot that frightened me. I wouldn’t have been frightened if I had seen him. It was he, really, who sent me here. I work it out that he couldn’t get it over and he sent me to Lutetia because he thought she could. I wonder—” he stopped short. This explanation came as though something had flashed electrically through his mind. But he did not pursue that wonder.

“Well, don’t you get discouraged,” Mrs. Spash reiterated. “You mark my words, she’ll manage to say what she’s got to say.”

“Well, it’s time I went to work,” Lindsay remarked a little listlessly. “After all, the life of Lutetia Murray must get finished. Oh, by the way, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay veered as though remembering suddenly something he had forgotten, “do other people see them?”

“No—at least I never heard tell that they did.”

“How did the rumor get about that the place was haunted, then?”

“I spread it,” Mrs. Spash explained. “I didn’t want folks breaking in to see if there was anything to steal. And I didn’t want them poking about the place.”

“How did you spread it?”

“I told children,” Mrs. Spash said simply. “Less than a month, folks were seeing all kinds of ridic’lous ghosts here. Nobody likes to go by alone at night.”

“It’s a curious thing,” Lindsay reverted to his main theme, “that I know her message has nothing to do with this biography. I don’t know how I know it; but I do. Of course, that would be the first thing a man would think of. It is something more instant, more acute. It beats me altogether. All I can do is wait.”

“Now don’t you think any more about it, Mr. Lindsay,” Mrs. Spash advised. “You go upstairs and set to work. I’m going to get you up the best lunch today you’ve had yet.”

“That’s the dope,” Lindsay agreed. “The only way to take a man’s mind off his troubles is to give him a good dinner. You’ll have to work hard, though, Eunice Spash, to beat your own record.”

Lindsay arose and sauntered into the front hall and up the stairs. He turned into the room at the right which he had reserved for work, now that Mrs. Spash was on the premises. At this moment, it was flooded with sunlight.... A faint odor of the honeysuckle vine at the corner seemed to emanate from the light itself....

Instantly ... he realized ... that the room was not empty.

Lindsay became feverishly active. Eyes down, he mechanically shuffled his papers. He collected yesterday’s written manuscript, brought the edges down on the table in successive clicks, until they made an even, rectangular pile. He laid his pencils out in a row. He changed the point in his penholder. He moved the ink-bottle. But this availed his spirit nothing. “I am incredibly stupid,” he said aloud. His voice was low, but it rang as hollowly as though he were from another world. “If you could only speak to me. Can’t you speak to me?”

He did not raise his eyes. But he waited for a long interval, during which the silence in the room became so heavy and cold that it almost blotted out the sunlight.

“But have patience with me. I want to serve you. Oh, you don’t know how I want to serve you. I give you my word, I’ll get it sometime and I think not too late. I’ll kill myself if I don’t. I’m putting all I am and all I have into trying to understand. Don’t give me up. It’s only because I’m flesh and blood.”

He stopped and raised his eyes.

The room was empty.

That afternoon Lindsay took a walk so long, so devil-driven that he came back streaming perspiration from every pore. Mrs. Spash regarded him with a glance in which disapproval struggled with sympathy. “I don’t know as you’d ought to wear yourself out like that, Mr. Lindsay. Later, perhaps you’ll need all your strength—”

“Very likely you’re right, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay agreed. “But I’ve been trying to work it out.”

Mrs. Spash left as usual at about seven. By nine, the last remnant of the long twilight, a collaboration of midsummer with daylight-saving, had disappeared. Lindsay lighted his lamp and sat down with Lutetia’s poems. The room was peculiarly cheerful. The beautiful Murray sideboard, recently discovered and recovered, held its accustomed place between the two windows. The old Murray clock, a little ship swinging back and forth above its brass face, ticked in the corner. The old whale-oil lamps had resumed their stand, one at either end of the mantel. Old pieces, old though not Lutetia’s—they were gone irretrievably—bits picked up here and there, made the deep sea-shell corner cabinet brilliant with the color of old china, glimmery with the shine of old pewter, sparkly with the glitter of old glass. Many chairs—windsors, comb-backs, a Boston rocker—filled the empty spaces with an old-time flavor. In traditional places, high old glasses held flowers. The single anachronism was the big, nickel, green-shaded student lamp.

Lindsay needed rest, but he could not go to bed. He knew perfectly well that he was exhausted, but he knew equally well that he was not drowsy. His state of mind was abnormal. Perhaps the three large cups of jet-black coffee that he had drunk at dinner helped in this matter. But whatever the cause, he was conscious of every atom of this exaggerated spiritual alertness; of the speed with which his thoughts drove; of the almost insupportable mental clarity through which they shot.

“If this keeps up,” he meditated, “it’s no use my going to bed at all tonight. I could not possibly sleep.”

He found Lutetia’s poems agreeable solace at this moment. They contained no anodyne for his restlessness; but at least they did not increase it. Her poetry had not been considered successful, but Lindsay liked it. It was erratic in meter; irregular in rhythm. But at times it astounded him with a delicate precision of expression; at moments it surprised him with an opulence of fancy. He read on and on—

Suddenly that mental indicator—was it a flutter of his spirit or merely a lowering of the spiritual temperature?—apprised him that he was not alone.... But as usual, after he realized that his privacy had been invaded, he continued to read; his gaze caught, as though actually tied, by the print.... After a while he shut the book.... But he still sat with his hand clutching it, one finger marking the place.... He did not lift his eyes when he spoke....

“Tell the others to go,” he demanded.

After a while he arose. He did not move to the other end of the room nor did he glance once in that direction. But on his side, he paced up and down with a stern, long-strided prowl. He spoke aloud.

“Listen to me!” His tone was peremptory. “We’ve got to understand each other tonight. I can’t endure it any longer; for I know as well as you that the time is getting short. You can’t speak to me. But I can speak to you. Lutetia, you’ve got to outdo yourself tonight. You must give me a sign. Do you understand? You must show me. Now summon all that you have of strength, whatever it is, to give me that sign—do you understand, all you have. Listen! Whatever it is that you want me to do, it isn’t here. I know that now. I know it because I’ve been here two months— Whatever it is, it must be put through somewhere else. An idea came to me this morning. I spent all the afternoon thinking it out. Maybe I’ve got a clue. It all started in New York. He tried to get it to me there. Listen! Tell me! Quick! Quick! Quick! Do you want me to go to New York?”

The answer was instantaneous. As though some giant hand had seized the house in its grip, it shook. Shook for an infinitesimal fraction of an instant. Almost, it seemed to Lindsay, walls quivered; panes rattled; shutters banged, doors slammed. And yet in the next infinitesimal fraction of that instant he knew that he had heard no tangible sound. Something more exquisite than sound had filled that unmeasurable interval with shattering, deafening confusion.

Lindsay turned with a sharp wheel; glared into the dark of the other side of the room.

Lindsay dashed upstairs to his desk. There he found a time-table. The ten-fifteen from Quinanog would give him ample time to catch the midnight to New York. He might not be able to get a sleeping berth; but the thing he needed least, at that moment, was sleep. In fact, he would rather sit up all night. He flung a few things into his suitcase; dashed off a note to Mrs. Spash. In an incredibly short time, he was striding over the two miles of road which led to the station.

There happened to be an unreserved upper berth. It was a superfluous luxury as far as Lindsay was concerned. He lay in it during what remained of the night, his eyes shut but his spirit more wakeful than he had ever known it. “Every revolution of these wheels,” he said once to himself, “brings me nearer to it, whatever it is.” He arose early; was the first to invade the washroom; the first to step off the train; the first to leap into a taxicab. He gave the address of Spink’s apartments to the driver. “Get there faster than you can!” he ordered briefly. The man looked at him—and then proceeded to break the speed law.

Washington Square was hardly awake when they churned up to the sidewalk. Lindsay let himself in the door; bounded lightly up the two flights of stairs; unlocked the door of Spink’s apartment. Everything was silent there. The dust of two months of vacancy lay on the furnishings. Lindsay stood in the center of the room, contemplating the door which led backward into the rest of the apartment.

“Well, old top, you’re not going to trouble me any longer. I get that with my first breath. I’ve done what she wanted and what you wanted so far. Now what in the name of heaven is the next move?”

He stood in the center of the room waiting, listening.

And then into his hearing, stretched to its final capacity, came sound. Just sound at first; then a dull murmur. Lindsay’s hair rose with a prickling progress from his scalp. But that murmur was human. It continued.

Lindsay went to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hall. The murmur grew louder. It was a woman’s voice; a girl’s voice; unmistakably the voice of youth. It came from the little room next to Spink’s apartment.

Again Lindsay listened. The monotone broke; grew jagged; grew shrill; became monotonous again. Suddenly the truth dawned on him. It was the voice of madness or of delirium.

He advanced to the door and knocked. Nobody answered. The monotone continued. He knocked again. Nobody answered. The monotone continued. He tried the knob. The door was locked. With his hand still on the knob, he put his shoulder to the door; gave it a slow resistless pressure. It burst open.

It was a small room and furnished with the conventional furnishings of a bedroom. Lindsay saw but two things in it. One was a girl, sitting up in the bed in the corner; a beautiful slim creature with streaming loose red hair; her cheeks vivid with fever spots; her eyes brilliant with fever-light. It was she who emitted the monotone.

The other thing was a miniature, standing against the glass on the bureau. A miniature of a beautiful woman in the full lusciousness of a golden blonde maturity.

The woman of the miniature was Lutetia Murray.

The girl—

X

She felt that the room was full of sunshine. Even through her glued-down lids she caught the darting dazzle of it. She knew that the air was full of bird voices. Even through her drowse-filmed ears, she caught the singing sound of them. She would like to lift her lids. She would like to wake up. But after all it was a little too easy to sleep. The impulse with which she sank back to slumber was so soft that it was scarcely impulse. It dropped her slowly into an enormous dark, a colossal quiet.

Presently she drifted to the top of that dark quiet. Again the sunlight flowed into the channels of seeing. Again the birds picked on the strings of hearing. By an enormous effort she opened her eyes.

She stared from her bed straight at a window. A big vine stretched films of green leaf across it. It seemed to color the sunshine that poured onto the floor—green. She looked at the window for a long time. Presently she discovered among the leaves a crimson, vase-like flower.

“Why, how thick the trumpet-vine has grown!” she said aloud.

It seemed to her that there was a movement at her side. But that movement did not interest her. She did not fall into a well this time. She drifted off on a tide of sleep. Presently—perhaps it was an hour later, perhaps five minutes—she opened her eyes. Again she stared at the window. Again the wonder of growth absorbed her thought; passed out of it. She looked about the room. Her little bedroom set, painted a soft creamy yellow with long tendrils of golden vine, stood out softly against the faded green cartridge paper.

“Why! Why have they put the bureau over there?” she demanded aloud of the miniature of Glorious Lutie which hung beside the bureau. With a vague alarm, her eyes sped from point to point. The dado of Weejubs stood out as though freshly restored. But all her pictures were gone; the four colored prints, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—each the head of a little girl, decked with buds or flowers, fruit or furs, had vanished. The faded squares where they had hung showed on the walls. Oh, woe, her favorite of all, “My Little White Kittens,” had disappeared too. On the other hand—on table, on bureau, and on commode-top—crowded the little Chinese toys.

“Why, when did they bring them in from the Dew Pond?” she asked herself, again aloud.

With a sudden stab of memory, she reached her hand up on the wall. How curious! Only yesterday she could scarcely touch the spring; now her hand went far beyond it. She pressed. The little panel opened slowly. She raised herself in bed and looked through the aperture.

Glorious Lutie’s room was stark—bare, save for a bed and her long wooden writing-table.

Her thoughts flew madly ... suddenly her whole acceptance of things crumbled. Why! She wasn’t Cherie and eight. She was Susannah and twenty-five; and the last time she had been anywhere she had been in New York.... Lightnings of memory tore at her ... the Carbonado Mining Company ... Eloise ... a Salvation Army woman on the street ... roofers. Yet this was Blue Meadows. She did not have to pinch herself or press on her sleepy eyelids. It was Blue Meadows. The trumpet-vine, though as gigantic as Jack’s beanstalk, proved it. The painted furniture proved it. The Chinese toys proved it. Yes, and if she wanted the final touch that clinched all argument, there beside the head of the bed was the maple gazelle. This really was not the final proof. The final proof was human and it entered the room at that moment in the person of Mrs. Spash. And Mrs. Spash—in her old, quaint inaccurate way—was calling her as Cherry.

Susannah burst into tears.

“Oh, I feel so much better now,” Susannah said after a little talk; more sleep; then talk again. “I’m going to be perfectly well in a little while. I want to get up. And oh, dear Mrs. Spash—do you remember how sometimes I used to call you Mrs. Splash? I do want as soon as possible to see Mr. Lindsay and his cousin—Miss Stockbridge, did you say? I want to thank them, of course. How can I ever thank them enough? And I want to talk to him about the biography. Oh, I’m sure I can give him so much. And I can make out a list of people who can tell him all the things you and I don’t remember; or never knew. And then, in my trunk in New York, is a package of all Glorious Lutie’s letters to me. I think he will want to publish some of them; they are so lovely, so full of our games—and jingles, and even drawings. Couldn’t I sit up now?”

“I don’t see why not,” Mrs. Spash said. “You’ve slept for nearly twenty-six hours, Cherry. You waked up once—or half-waked up. We gave you some hot milk and you went right to sleep again.”

“It’s going to make me well—just being at Blue Meadows,” Susannah prophesied. “If I could only stay— But I’m grateful for a day, an hour.”

Later, she came slowly down the stairs—one hand on the rail, the other holding Mrs. Spash’s arm. She wore her faded creamy-pink, creamy-yellow Japanese kimono, held in prim plaits by the broad sash, a big obi bow at the back. Her red hair lay forward in two long glittering braids. Her face was still pale, but her eyes overran with a lucent blue excitement. It caught on her eyelashes and made stars there.

A slim young man in flannels; tall with a muscular litheness; dark with a burnished tan; handsome; arose from his work at the long refectory table. He came forward smiling—his hand outstretched. “My cousin, Miss Stockbridge, has run in to Boston to do some shopping,” he explained. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you up, or how glad she will be.” He took her disengaged arm and reinforced Mrs. Spash’s efforts. They guided her into a big wing chair. The young man found a footstool for her.

“I suppose I’m not dreaming, Mr. Lindsay,” Susannah apprised him tremulously. “And yet how can it be anything but a dream? I left this place fifteen years ago and I have never seen it since. How did I get back here? How did you find me? How did you know who I was? And what made you so heavenly good as to bring me here? I remember fragments here and there— Mrs. Spash tells me I’ve had the flu.”

Lindsay laughed. “That’s all easily explained,” he said with a smoothness almost meretricious. “I happened to go to New York on business. As usual I went to my friend Sparrel’s apartment. You were ill and delirious in the next room. I heard you; forced the door open and sent at once for a doctor. He pronounced it a belated case of flu. So I telephoned for Miss Stockbridge; we moved you into my apartment and after you passed the crisis—thank God, you escaped pneumonia!—I asked the doctor if I could bring you over here. He agreed that the country air would be the very best thing for you, and yet would not advise me to do it. He thought it was taking too great a risk. But I felt—I can’t tell you how strongly I felt it—that it would be the best thing for you. My cousin stood by me, and I took the chance. Sometimes now, though, I shudder at my own foolhardiness. You don’t remember—or do you?—that I went through the formality of asking your consent.”

“I do remember now—vaguely,” Susannah laughed. “Isn’t it lucky I didn’t—in my weakness—say no?”

Lindsay laughed again. “I shouldn’t have paid any attention to it, if you had. I knew that this was what you needed. You were sleeping then about twenty-five hours out of the twenty-four. So one night we brought you in a taxi to the boat and took the night trip to Boston. The boat was making its return trip that night, but I bribed them to let you stay on it all day until it was almost ready to sail. Late in the afternoon, we brought you in an automobile to Quinanog. You slept all the way. That was yesterday afternoon. It was dark when we got here. You didn’t even open your eyes when I carried you into the house. In the meantime I had wired Mrs. Spash—and she fixed up your room, as much like the way it used to be when you were a child, as she could remember.”

“It’s all too marvelous,” Susannah murmured. New brilliancies were welling up into her turquoise eyes, the deep dark fringes of lash could not hold them; the stars kept dropping off their tips. Fresh spurts of color invaded her face. Nervously her long white hands pulled at her coppery braids.

“There are so many questions I shall ask you,” she went on, “when I’m strong enough. But some I must ask you now. How did you happen to come here? And when did the idea of writing Glorious Lutie’s—my aunt’s—biography occur to you? And how did you come to know Mrs. Spash? Where did you find the little Chinese toys? And my painted bedroom set? And the sideboard there? And the six-legged highboy? Oh dear, a hundred, thousand, million things. But first of all, how did you know that, now being Susannah Ayer, I was formerly Susannah Delano?”

“There was the miniature of Miss Murray hanging on your wall. That made me sure—in—in some inexplicable way—that you were the little lost Cherry. And of course we went through your handbag to make sure. We found some letters addressed to Susannah Delano Ayer. But will you tell me how you do happen to be Susannah Ayer, when you were formerly Susannah Delano, alias Cherry—or Cherie?”

“I went from here to Providence to live with a large family of cousins. Their name was Ayer, and I was so often called Ayer that finally I took the name.” Susannah paused, and then with a sudden impulse toward confidence, she went on. “I grew up with my cousins. I was the youngest of them all. The two oldest girls married, one a Californian, the other a Canadian. I haven’t seen them for years. The three boys are scattered all over everywhere, by the war. My uncle died first; then my aunt. She left me the five hundred dollars with which I got my business training.”

The look of one who is absorbing passionately all that is being said to him was on Lindsay’s face. But a little perplexity troubled it. “Glorious Lutie?” he repeated interrogatively.

“Oh, of course,” Susannah murmured. “I always called her Glorious Lutie. She always called me Glorious Susie—that is when she didn’t call me Cherie. And we had a game—the Abracadabra game. When she was telling me a story—her stories were marvels; they went on for days and days—and she got tired, she could always stop it by saying, Abracadabra! If I didn’t reply instantly with Abracadabra, the story stopped. Of course she always caught my little wits napping—I was so absorbed in the story that I could only stutter and pant, trying to remember that long word.”

“That’s a Peter Ibbetson trick,” Lindsay commented.

The talk, thus begun, lasted for the three hours which elapsed before Miss Stockbridge’s return. Two narratives ran through their talk; Lindsay’s, which dealt with superficial matters, began with his return to America from France; Susannah’s, which began with that sad day, fifteen years ago, when she saw Blue Meadows for the last time. But neither narrative went straight. They zig-zagged; they curved, they circled. Those deviations were the result of racing up squirrel tracks of opinion and theory; of little excursions into the allied experiences of youth; even of talks on books. Once it was interrupted by the noiseless entry of Mrs. Spash, who deposited a tray which contained a glass of milk, a pair of dropped eggs, a little mound of buttered toast. Susannah suddenly found herself hungry. She drained her glass, ate both eggs, devoured the last crumb of toast.

After this, she felt so vigorous that she fell in with Lindsay’s suggestion that she walk to the door. There she stood on the door-stone for a preoccupied, half-joyful, half-melancholy interval studying the garden. Then, leaning on his arm, she ventured as far as the seat under the copper-beech. Later, even, she went to the barn and the Dew Pond. Before she could get tired, Lindsay brought her back, reestablishing her in the chair. Then—and not till then—and following another impulse to confide in Lindsay, Susannah told him the whole story of the Carbonado Mining Company. Perhaps his point of view on that matter gave her her second accession of vitality. He paced up and down the room during her narrative; his hands, fists. But he laughed their threats to scorn. “Now don’t give another thought to that gang of crooks!” he adjured her. “I know a man in New York—a lawyer. I’ll have him look up that crowd and put the fear of God into them. They’ll probably be flown by that time, however. Undoubtedly they were making ready for their getaway. Don’t think of it again. They can’t hurt you half as much as that bee that’s trying to get in the door.” He was silent for a moment, staring fixedly down at his own manuscript on the table. “By God!” he burst out suddenly, “I’ve half a mind to beat it on to New York. I’d like to be present. I’d have some things to say—and do.”

Somewhere toward the end of this long talk, “I’ve not said a word yet, Mr. Lindsay,” Susannah interpolated timidly, “of how grateful I am to you—and your cousin. But it’s mainly because I’ve not had the strength yet. I don’t know how I’m going to repay you. I don’t know how I’m even going to tell you. What I owe you—just in money—let alone eternal gratitude.”

“Now, that’s all arranged,” Lindsay said smoothly. “You don’t know what a find you were. You’re an angel from heaven. You’re a Christmas present in July. For a long time I’ve realized that I needed a secretary. Somebody’s got to help me on Lutetia’s life or I’ll never get it done. Who better qualified than Lutetia’s own niece? In fact you will not only be secretary but collaborator. As soon as you’re well enough, we’ll go to work every morning and we’ll work together until it’s done.”

Susannah leaned back, snuggled into the soft recess of the comfortable chair. She dropped her lids over the dazzling brilliancy of her eyes. “I suppose I ought to say no. I suppose I ought to have some proper pride about accepting so much kindness. I suppose I ought to show some firmness of mind, pawn all my possessions and get back to work in New York or Boston. Girls in novels always do those things. But I know I shall do none of them. I shall say yes. For I haven’t been so happy since Glorious Lutie died.”

“Oh,” Lindsay exclaimed quickly as though glad to reduce this dangerous emotional excitement. “There comes the lost Anna Sophia Stockbridge. She’s a dandy. I think you’ll like her. It’s awfully hard not to.”

The instant Susannah had disappeared with Miss Stockbridge up the stairs, Mrs. Spash appeared in the Long Room. Apparently, she came with a definite object—an object in no way connected with the futile dusting movements she began to emit.

Lindsay watched her.

Suddenly Mrs. Spash’s eyes came up; met his. They gazed at each other a long moment; a gaze that was luminous with question and answer.

“She’s gone,” Lindsay announced after a while.

Mrs. Spash nodded briskly.

“She’ll never come back,” Lindsay added.

Again Mrs. Spash nodded briskly.

“They’ve all gone,” Lindsay stated.

For the third time Mrs. Spash briskly nodded.

“When Cherie came, they left,” Lindsay concluded.

“They’d done what they wanted to do,” Mrs. Spash vouchsafed. “Brought you and Cherry together. So there was no need. She took them away. She’d admire to stay. That’s like her. But she don’t want to make the place seem—well, queer. So, as she allus did, she gives up her wish.”

“Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay exploded suddenly after a long pause, “we’ve never seen them. You understand we’ve never seen them; either of us. They never were here.”

Mrs. Spash nodded for the fourth time.

That night after his cousin and his guest had gone to bed, Lindsay wandered about the place. The moon was big enough to turn his paths into streams of light. He walked through the flower garden; into the barn; about the Dew Pond. The tallest hollyhocks scarcely moved, so quiet was the night. The little pond showed no ripple except a flash of the moonlight. The barn was a cavern of gloom. Lindsay gazed at everything as though from a new point of view.

An immeasurable content filled him.

After a while he returned to the house. His picture of Lutetia Murray still hung over the mantel in the living-room. He gazed at it for a long while. Then he turned away. As he looked down the length of the living-room, there was in his face a whimsical expression, half of an achieved happiness, half of a lurking regret. “This house has never been so full of people since I’ve been here,” he mused, “and yet never was it so empty. My beloved ghosts, I miss you. But you’ve not all gone after all. You’ve left one little ghost behind. Lutetia, I thank you for her. How I wish you could come again to see.... But you’re right. Don’t come! Not that I’m afraid. You’re too lovely—”

His thoughts broke halfway. They took another turn. “I wonder if it ever happened to any other man before in the history of the world to see the little-girl ghost of the woman—”

Blue Meadows had for several weeks now been projecting pictures from its storied past into the light of everyday. Could it have projected into that everyday one picture from the future, it would have been something like this.

Susannah came into the south living-room. Her husband was standing between the two windows.

“Davy,” she exclaimed joyfully, “I’ve located the lowboy. A Mrs. Norton in West Hassett owns it. Of course she’s asking a perfectly prohibitive price, but of course we’ve got to have it.”

“Yes,” Lindsay answered absently, “we’ve got to have it.”

“I’m glad we found things so slowly,” Susannah dreamily. “It adds to the wonder and magic of it all. It makes the dream last longer. It keeps our romance always at the boiling point.”

She put one arm about her husband’s neck and kissed him. Lindsay turned; kissed her.

“At least we have the major pieces back,” Susannah said contentedly. “And little Lutetia Murray Lindsay will grow up in almost the same surroundings that Susannah Ayer enjoyed. Oh—today—when I carried her over to the wall of the nursery, she noticed the Weejubs; she actually put her hand out to touch them.”

“Oh, there’s something here for you—from Rome—just came in the mail,” Lindsay exclaimed. “It’s addressed to Susannah Delano too.”

“From Rome!” Susannah ejaculated. “Susannah Delano!” She cut the strings of the package. Under the wrappings appeared—swathed in tissue paper—a picture. A letter dropped from the envelope. Susannah seized it; turned to the signature.

“Garrison Monroe!” she ejaculated. “Oh, dear dear Uncle Garry, he’s alive after all!” She read the letter aloud, the tears welling in her eyes.

“How wonderful!” she commented when she finished. “You see, he’s apparently specialized in tomb-sculpture.”

She pulled the tissue paper from the picture. Their heads met, examining it.

“Oh, how lovely!” Susannah exclaimed in a hushed voice. And “It’s beautiful!” Lindsay agreed in a low tone.

It was the photograph of a bit of sculptured marble; a woman swathed in rippling draperies lying, at ease, on her side. One hand, palm upward, fingers a little curled, lay by her cheek; the other fell across her breast. A veil partially obscured the delicate profile. But from every veiled feature, from every line of the figure, from every fold in the drapery, exuded rest.

“It’s perfect!” Susannah said, still in a low tone. “Perfect. Many a time she’s fallen asleep just like than when we’ve all been talking and laughing. When she slept, her hand always lay close to her face as it is here. She always wore long floating scarves. You see he had to do her face from photographs ... and memory.... He’s used that scarf device to conceal.... How beautiful! How beautiful!”

There came silence.

“Mrs. Spash says he was in love with her,” Susannah went on. “Of course I was too young. I didn’t realize it. But it’s all here, I think. Did you notice that part of the letter where he says that for the last year or two his mind has been full of her? And of all his life here? That’s very pathetic, isn’t it? Now there will be a fitting monument over her.... He says it will be here in a few months. We must send him pictures when it’s put on her grave. How happy it makes me! He says he’s nearly eighty.... How beautiful.... You’re not listening to me,” she accused her husband with sudden indignation. But her indignation tempered itself by a flurry of little kisses when, following the direction of his piercing gaze, she saw it ended on the miniature which hung beside the secretary. “Looking at Glorious Lutie!” she mocked tenderly. “How that miniature fascinates you! Sometimes,” she added, obviously inventing whimsical cause for grievance, “sometimes I think you’re as much in love with her as you are with me.”

“If I am,” Lindsay agreed, “it’s because there’s so much of you in her.”

THE END

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