r was flying
through the sweet night air once more.

Arriving at the Gables they could win no response to their ringing; but
it was imperative they should gain an entrance; and so it came about
that the first time Iris entered Anstice's house she entered it
unheralded, and unwelcomed by any friendly greeting.

So, too, it came about that when Anstice at last awoke to the fact that
there were other human beings in the house beside himself he realized,
with a pang of consternation and amazement sufficiently sharp to pierce
even through the fog which clouded his spirit, that one of his uninvited
guests was the girl from whom, a few short hours earlier, he had parted,
as he thought, for ever.

He half rose from the couch on which he crouched, and stared at the
advancing figures with haunted eyes.

"I ... I ..." His voice, husky, uncertain, brought both his visitors to
a halt; and for a wild moment he fancied that after all they were no
real beings, only more than usually vivid shadows, projected visions
from the whirling phantasmagoria of his brain. The light behind them,
streaming in through the open door, confused him, made him feel as
though this were all a trick of the nerves, a kind of chaotic nightmare;
and with a muttered curse at his own folly in imagining for one moment
that Iris Wayne herself stood before him, he fell back on the couch and
closed his aching eyes wearily.

"Anstice--I say, you're wanted--badly--at Cherry Orchard." Surely that
was Bruce Cheniston's voice which beat upon his ears until it reached
his inner sense. Yet what was that he was saying ... something about an
accident ... to Cherry ... but the time of cherries was over ... surely
now the summer was dead ... he was cold, bitterly cold, the fire must be
out, his teeth were chattering ... there was a mist before his eyes....

"Dr. Anstice, is anything the matter? Are you ill?"

That voice belonged to no one on earth but Iris Wayne, yet that
insubstantial grey shadow which seemed to speak was only another ghost,
a figment of his overwrought brain. He wished--how he wished--that these
ghosts would leave him, would return to the haunted place whence they
came and allow him to sink once more into the blessed oblivion from
which they called him with their thin, far-away voices....

"It's no use, Iris!" Cheniston spoke abruptly, puzzled by the other
man's strange behaviour, to which as yet he could assign no cause. "The
man's asleep--or dazed