 The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier, in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a new perception of its 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 Pangburn 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 out, well, there's lying in dorseture. It belongs to Hugo's cousins, and you can get it for a song. The reason she gave, for its being obtainable on these terms, its remoteness from a tradition, 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 jacosely 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 doubts and demands, refusing to believe that the house their friend recommended was really tutor, until they learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds until she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water supply. It was too uncomfortable to be true, Edward Boyne had continued to exult, as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively rung from her. But he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a 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 been struck by a note of flatness in Alita's answering hilarity. Oh, doors are just 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 lying? His rejoinder had made Alita laugh again, and 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 signalment been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito? Alita could only shake her head. Don't ask me, but it has. And then suddenly, Mary spoke up, as if from cavernous depths of divination, suddenly, long afterward, one says to oneself, that was it. She was 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 Alita's pupils. I suppose so. One just has to wait. Oh, hang waiting, Ned broken. Life's too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. It's free to 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. Stare they were settled at lying, and the life they had yearned for, to the point of planning it in advance 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 darkened to a deeper solitude. It was for the ultimate indulgence of such sensations that Mary Boyne, abruptly exiled from New York by her husband's business, had endured for nearly fourteen years the sole deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town, 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, quote, economic basis of culture, quote. 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. Dorseture had attracted them from the first by an air of remoteness out of all proportion with 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 distance 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 contrasts. They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every delicious mouthful. The butter had certainly been laid on thick at lying. The old house hidden under a shoulder of the Downes 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 completely in its special charm, the charm 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 fish-pond between the ews. But these backwaters of existence sometimes breed in their smuggish depths strange acuities of emotion. When Mary Boyne had felt from the first the mysterious stir of intenser memories. The feeling had ever been stronger than on this particular afternoon, when, waiting in the library for the lamps to come, 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 Downes. She had noticed of late that he preferred to go alone, 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 thought it would. And there were lines of perplexity between his eyes such as had never been there in his engineering days. He had often then 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 the summary of the opening chapter, showed a firm hold on his subject and an increasing 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 source of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health then. But physically he had gained, since they had come to Dorceture, unrobust her, ruddier and fresher-eyed. It was only within the last week that she had felt in him the indefinable change which 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 wrap of wonder, and she looked about her down the 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 rows of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the 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 lying, had been gradually left aside as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her rural neighbors, but beyond a vague, they do say so, O' Mom. 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 boyns had set the matter down to their profit and loss account, agreeing that lying 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 could never affirm its separate existence as the ghost. And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of the references, which were numerous enough to make them soon 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 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. If one could only get into close enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret and acquire the ghost-site on one's own account, perhaps in his long hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired it already, and was silently carrying about the 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 taste as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her. But after all, except for the fun of the shudder, 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 lying one did not know it. Not till long afterwards Alita 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 thoughts to the early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a lively confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the house as, treasure after treasure it 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 on a flight of corkscrew stairs leading to a flat ledge on 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 coin 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 at her side, 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 view hedges about the fish-pond and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn. And now the other way, he had said, 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 high road 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 hello that made her turn to glance at him. Distinctly, yes, she now recalled that 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 a doubtful gait of a stranger who seeks his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness and grayishness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its dress. But her husband had apparently seen more, seen enough to make him push past her with a hasty weight and dash down the stairs without pausing to give her a hand. A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her after a provisional clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning to follow him first more cautiously, and when she had reached the landing she paused again for a less definite reason, leaning over the banister to strain her eyes through the silence of the brown sun-fleck depths. 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 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 crossed the threshold and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers on his desk. He looked up as if surprised at her 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 to reflect. The man? Well, 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. But 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 to scramble up melden 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 melden steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine rising above the roof of line. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incidents having occurred on the very day of their ascent to melden that had kept it stored away in the fold of memory from which it now emerged. For in itself it had no mark of the portentus. At the moment there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash himself from the roof in 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 rushing 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 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 him 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 questions had occurred to her at the time, yet from the promptness with which they now marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sense that they must all along have been there waiting their hour too. Weary with her thoughts she moved to the window. The library was now quite 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 far down the perspective of bare limes, 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 had a distant vision from the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not having been Peter's, and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock, the figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband's, and she turned to meet him as he entered with the confession of her folly. It's really too absurd, she laughed up, but I never can remember. Remember what, boy in question, as they drew together. That when one sees the lying 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 preoccupied face. Did you think you'd seen it? He asked, after an appreciable interval. Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, and 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. Oh, yes, 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 looked up to ask, Have you any idea how long? Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat she glanced over, startled at her husband's profile, which was projected against the circle of lamp-light. No, none of you, she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added stress 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 exclaimed, 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 parlour made 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 afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself 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. Lines of 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 enclosed 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 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 mind, 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 strange 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 reassurance of his tone. 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? Pretty nearly every crime in the calendar. Boy in it tossed the clipping down and thrown himself 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. Bainly she strained back among her memories. But if you helped him, why does he make this return? 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 Bain's report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt during their years of exile 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 labours, such brief leisure as he and she could command, should be used as an escape from immediate preoccupations. A flight to the life they had 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 at her husband, and was again 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 it, 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 to 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 hands seek hers and clasp it. And turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met his smiling 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 was never writer. He laughed back at her, holding her close. End of Part One. Part Two. Read by Charles Blickmore. Afterward, Chapter Three. One of the strangest things she was to afterward recall out of all the next days' strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery of her sense of security. It was in the air when she woke in her low-sealed dusky room. It went with her downstairs to the breakfast table, flashed out at her from the fire, and reduplicated itself 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 fears 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 now affirmed itself in the very face of menace and suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and unconsciously himself, than after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him. It was almost as if he had been aware of her doubts and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did. It was as clear a 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 Boine at his desk, indulging herself as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent pipe in 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 happy loitering about the different quarters of her domain as if spring were already at work there. There were such endless 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 was 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 hot house, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis at 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 lying 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 along the springy turf of the bowling green to the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass terrace, looking across the fish pond and ewe hedges to the long house front, with its twisted chimney stacks and blue roof angles all drenched in the pale gold moisture of the air. Being thus across the level tracery of the gardens, it sent her from open windows and hospitably to 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 such 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. Such 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 given, did not remotely resemble her notion of an authority on hot-house boilers. The newcomer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a gentleman, perhaps a traveller, who wishes to make it known that his intrusion is involuntary. Lying occasionally attracted the more cultivated traveller, and Mary half expected to see the stranger disemble 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 hesitation of his attitude, Is there anyone you wish to see? I came to see Mr. Boyne, he answered. His intonation, rather than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the 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 her equally sensible to such claims, but she was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful of his having given anyone the right to intrude on them. Having an appointment with my husband, she asked. The visitor hesitated, as if unprepared for the question. I think he expects me, he replied. It was Mary's turn to hesitate. You see, this is his time for work. He never sees anyone in the morning. He looked at her a moment without answering, then, as if accepting her decision, he began to move away. As he turned, Mary saw him pause and glance up at the peaceful house-front. Something in his air suggested weariness and disappointment, the dejection of the traveller who has come from far off and whose hours are limited by the timetable. It occurred to her that if this were the case her refusal might have made his air in vain, and a sense of compunction caused her to hasten after him. May I ask if you have come a long way? He gave her the same graved look. Yes, I have come a long way. Then if you'll go into the house, no doubt my husband will see you now. You'll find him in the library. She did not know why she had added the last phrase, except from a vague impulse to atone for her previous inhospitality. The visitor seemed about to express his thanks, but her attention was distracted by the approach of the gardener with a companion who bore all the marks of being the expert from Dorchester. This way, she said, waving the stranger to the house. And an instant later she had forgotten him in the absorption of her meeting with the boiler-maker. The encounter led to such far-reaching results that the engineer ended by finding it expedient to ignore his train, and Mary was beguiled into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed confabulation among the flower-pots. When the colloquy ended, she was surprised to find 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 boing to be still at work. 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 pledged her. The fact that she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty, and somehow, in contrast to the vague fears 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 writer. She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlor maid from the threshold roused her with an inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their jokes that Trimmel announced luncheon as if she were divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an absent-minded assent. She felt Trimmel wavering doubtfully on the threshold, as if in rebuke of such unconsidered assent. 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 usual measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, Trimmel returned with the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus impelled, opened the library door. Boine was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him before the bookshelves, somewhere down the length of the room. But her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her that he was not there. She turned back to the powermaid. Mr. Boine must be upstairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready. Trimmel appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obedience and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid on her. The struggle resulted in her saying, If you please, ma'am, Mr. Boine's not upstairs. But in his room are you sure? I'm sure, ma'am. Mary consulted the clock. Where is he then? He's gone out, Trimmel announced, with a superior air of one who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have put first. Mary's conjecture had been right then. Boine 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 French window, opening directly on the U Garden. But the parlormaid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out, Please, ma'am, Mr. Boine didn't go that way. Mary turned back. Where did he go, and when? He went out of the front door up the drive, ma'am. It was a matter of principle with Trimmel 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 tunnel of bare limes, but its perspective was as empty as when she had scandit on entering. Did Mr. Boine leave no message? Trimmel seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos. No, ma'am. 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, ma'am, said Trimmel, resignedly. When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmel. 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 Trimmel's eye the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who had been pressed too hard. I couldn't exactly say the hour, ma'am, because I didn't let the gentleman in, she replied, with an error of discreetly ignoring the irregularity of her mistress's course. You didn't let him in? No, ma'am. When the bell rang, I was dressing. An agnus? Go and ask Agnus, then, said Mary. Trimmel still wore her look of patient magnanimity. Agnus wouldn't, though, ma'am, for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trimming the wick of the new lamp from town. Trimmel, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new lamp. And so Mrs. Dawkett 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 Trimmel presently brought her there the kitchen maid's statement that the gentleman had called about eleven o'clock, and 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 she 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 Trimmel 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 unwanted 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-cars, 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 recurrences of habit. Though 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 further 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 footpath across the Downes, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the high road, there was little likelihood of their meeting. 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 Trimmel, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty. And with an unwanted exactness of visual memory, she 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 room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there 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 presence she threw herself on the bell-rope and gave it a sharp pull. The sharp summons brought Trimmel 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 Trimmel, putting down the lamp. "'You mean he's come back and gone out again?' "'No, ma'am. He's never been back.' The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now he had 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 insisted, with the shrill note of someone trying to be heard through a confusion of noises. "'That I couldn't say, ma'am.' Trimmel, 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, ma'am, 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 conformity, and at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestions of the folded paper. "'But he must have a name. Where's the paper?' She moved to the desk and began to turn over the 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 further 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 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 solution. Trimble 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 ready. 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 piece of paper, had requested that it should at once be carried into him. Then you don't know what he wrote. You're not sure it was his name. The kitchen maid was not sure, but supposing it was, since he had written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce. And when you carried the paper into 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 a momentary inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmel, who, by means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard the two gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front door together. And if you saw the strange 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, his hat-mom was different like, if you might say. Different? How different? Mary flashed out, her own mind at the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, and then 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 had gone away with him. But who was he, and why had Boine obeyed him? Chapter 4 It leapt 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 flashlights from shore to shore, and across the dividing straits. Now, with Boine's name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait, how that rung 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 wicked joy of knowing something they would never know. In the fortnight since Boine's disappearance there had been no word of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that raised expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one but the kitchen maid had seen Boine 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 lying. And no one had met Edward Boine, 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 Sumerian night. Mary, while every official 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 ray into the darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of Boine's life, they had vanished like 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 Boine 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 to feed conjecture. I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose that there is now no further 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 by the letter was the fact of its showing Boine, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he had told his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself proved that the plaintiff was dead. It took several days of cabling to fix the identity of the parvus to whom the fragment 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 guess with what object Boine intended to seek his assistance. This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's 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 cloudy cauldron of human experience. Even Mary Boine'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 even moments of weariness 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 routine of daily 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 in 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 lying, in spite of the entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendations 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 she 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 in closing 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 and the shells 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. Lying was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets entrusted 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 silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means. Chapter 5 I don't say it wasn't straight, and yet I 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. One 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 salo man with a bald head and gold eyeglasses, and it sent a 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. And 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 had 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 faulted out. And her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw even to her confused perceptions an 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 someone less alert to seize the chance. And the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had put him on to the Blue Star Scheme. Parvis, at Mary's first 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 around 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, see, 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 accused 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 emissary of some evil 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 thought 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 admitted 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 eyeglasses 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 embarrassment. 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 suppose 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 when 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 mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it and finally had to ask for help. That called 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 over it. 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 headlines, 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 upstairs 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 he 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, 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 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. She straightened herself, and reached out for the paper which she had dropped. It's the man! I should know him anywhere, she persisted, in a voice that sounded to her own ears like a scream. Parvis's answer 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 clutching 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 L. Well. Robert L. Well? Her white stare seemed to travel into space. Then it was Robert L. Well who came for him. Came for Boyne? The day he went away from here? 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 L. Well 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 L. Well's death. She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's unemotional voice. Surely you remember, he urged her. Yes, she remembered. That was the profoundest horror of it. L. Well had died the day before her husband's disappearance. And this was L. Well'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 Pangburn before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lying, or had imagined that they might one day live here. 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 probably 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. 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. Yes, 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 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 gaze 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 just breathed at him. He came first on the 20th of October. I remember the date, because it was the day we went up meld and 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 Lyme 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 to die. 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 worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her temples. Oh, my God, I sent him to Ned. I told him where to go. I sent him to this room, she screamed. She felt the walls of books rush towards her like inward falling ruins. And she heard Parvis a long way off, 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 a lead to stare, speaking on the lawn at Pangburn. He won't know till afterward, it said. He won't know till long, long afterward. The End of Afterward by Edith Wharton.