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 signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to
preserve its incognito?"

Alida could only shake her head. "Don't ask me. But it has."

"And then suddenly--" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of
divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self, 'THAT WAS
it?'"

She was oddly 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 Alida's clear pupils. "I suppose so. One just has
to wait."

"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who can
only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do 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. Stair they were
established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point of
planning it out 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 darkening to a deeper solitude: it
was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had
endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the
Middle West, 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 "Economic Basis of
Culture"; 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.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to 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 produ