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family, that it would be nice to escape and be upon the road alone! His face betrayed all this; but the newly born maternal tenderness in her tone expressed itself in such a gleam of humorous indulgence that he was lifted up out of the shame of having been caught in such a treachery, on a delicious wave of sheer repose upon her understanding.
    “No, I won't change my mind,” he whispered, “but don't let anything they say keep you from coming, Mary.”
    “I think I can get you a little more money for—for the road, John,” she said hurriedly.
    He treated this with the decisive gesture of a strong man showing off before a weak girl. “I'll be very angry if you do,” he said. “Nothing would make me take it! So it's better not to waste breath.”
    Both dining-room and drawing-room and the hall and the passage outside these rooms were now left to themselves. Silent and alone too the now-darkened conservatory listened to the placid sub-human breathings of heliotrope and lemon verbena, the latter with a faint catch in its drowsy susurration, where one of its twigs was bleeding a little from the impact of the fingers of the indignant Mr. Didlington.
    Silent and alone the broad staircase fell into that trance of romantic melancholy which was its invariable mood when the hall lamp was first lit. The oil paintings upon its walls looked out from their gilt frames with that peculiar expression of indrawn expectancy—self-centred and yet patiently waiting—of which human passers-by catch only the psychic echo or shadow or after-taste, for a single flicker of a second, as if they had caught them off-guard.
    Of all these rooms the one thai now x'ell into the most intense attitude of strained expectancy was the drawing-room . . . “You ought to have been older than all your brothers, woman, instead of younger.” The words emanated from a pale, insubstantial husk upon the air, a husk that resembled the cast-off skin of a snake or the yet more fragile skin of a newt, diaphanous and yet flaccid, a form, a shape, a human transparency, limned upon the darkness above the great chair to the left of the fireplace. The words were almost as faint as the sub-human breathings of the plants in the conservatory. They were like the creakings of chairs after people have left a room for hours. They were like the opening and shutting of a door in an empty house. They were like the groan of a dead branch in an unfrequented shrubbery at the edge of a forsaken garden. They were like the whistle of the wind in a ruined clock-tower, a clock-tower without bell or balustrade, bare to the rainy sky, white with the droppings of jackdaws and starlings, forgetful of its past, without a future save that of anonymous dissolution. They were like words murmured in a ruined court where water fri>m broken cisterns drips disconsolately upon darkening stones, while one shapeless idol talks to another shapeless idol as the night falls. They were like the murmurs of forgotten worm-eaten boards, lying under a dark, swift stream, boards that once were the mossy spokes of some old water-mill and in their day have caught the gleam of many a morning sun but now are hardly noticeable even to swimming water-rats. No sooner were these words uttered, than a simulacrum in human form, seated opposite to the shade of the Rector returned a bitter response.
    "A cruel coward is what you are, William Crow, and what you've always been; but if ever, when I am dead, you leave your money to anyone but Philip's son I will punish you with a punishment ivorse than God's V
    While these words were being uttered the thin wraith from whom they came became lividly accentuated in its facial outlines which were of a ghastly pallor and hideously emaciated; but at the close, while she was actually crying out “worse than God's”' not a vestige of her lineaments remained visible.
    The other wraith too, in the chair opposite, although a faint film of his identity survived hers by two or three