that's what's the matter with you--well, wait."

He turned on his heel and walked off. He did not look back once. As he
vanished from sight Phyl clasped her hands together.

It was as though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas--or rather the
something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and
allied to insanity that inhabited his mind.

She was not thinking of herself, she was thinking of Richard Pinckney. She
felt that she had been the unconscious means of releasing against him an
evil force. A force that might injure or destroy him.

CHAPTER VII

She came out of the cemetery. There was no sign of Silas in the street nor
on the front of the church.

Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to
imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble,
things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through
herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned.

She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a
treasure house beyond a man's description, perhaps even beyond his true
appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring
handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask
of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous
preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from
the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the
life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth
miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual
preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that
corrupts.

A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of its brick and mortar; to keep
it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp
and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a
perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what
fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of
its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The
man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in
Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive.

She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl
came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she
had to tell.

Miss Pinckney care