In the midst
of a half-uttered direction to the serving-maid, Miss Farnham stopped
abruptly, and Griswold could feel her gaze, wide-eyed and
half-terrified, seemingly fixed upon him.

It was all over in the turning of a leaf: there had been no break in
the doctor's genial raillery, and the breathless little pause at the
other end of the table was only momentary. But Griswold fancied that
there was a subtle change in the daughter's attitude toward him dating
from the moment of interruptions.

Farther along, he decided that the change was in himself, and was merely
the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less
continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When
the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room,
little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and
the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest
and himself, was called away professionally. Griswold saw himself
confronting the really crucial stage of the ordeal, and prudence was
warning him that it would be safer to make his adieux and to go with his
host. It was partly Miss Farnham's protest, but more his own
determination to prove the bridge of peril to the uttermost, that made
him stay.

Miss Gilman, least obtrusive of chaperones, had been peacefully napping
for a good half-hour in her low rocker under the reading-lamp, and the
pictures in a thick quarto of Gulf Coast views had pleasantly filled the
interval for the two who were awake, when Griswold finally assured
himself that the danger of recognition was a danger past. As a mental
analyst he knew that the opening of each fresh door in the house of
present familiarity was automatically closing other doors opening upon
the past; and it came to him with a little flush of the seer's
exaltation that once again his prefigurings were finding their exact
fulfilment. In a spirit of artistic daring he yielded to a sudden
impulse, as one crossing the flimsiest of bridges may run and leap to
prove that his theory of safety-stresses is a sufficient guarantee of
his own immunity.

"You were speaking of first impressions of places," he said, while they
were still turning the leaves of the picture-book. "Are you a believer
in the absolute correctness of first impressions?"

"I don't know," was the thoughtful reply; but its after-word was more
definite: "As to places, I'm not sure that the first impression always