it was quite six when
he reached the house, and everybody dressing for the early dinner.

He made so hasty a change himself in his fear of being late, that when
he came down to the living-room in a quarter of an hour there was no one
there to meet him. Absorbed particles of the bright day gave off in the
dusk and made it golden. There were honeysuckles on the pergola outside,
and in the room beyond a girl singing a quiet air, half-trilled and
half-forgotten. He heard the singer moving toward him through the vacant
house, of which the doors stood open to the evening coolness, and the
click of the electric button as she passed, and saw the rooms burst one
by one into the bloom of shaded lights. So she came, busy with the
hummed fragments of her songs, and turned the lamp full on Peter before
she was aware of him, but she was not half so much disconcerted.

"You must be Mr. Weatheral," she said. "Mrs. Lessing sent me to say she
expected you. I am Miss Goodward."

She gave him her hand for a gracious moment before she turned to what
had brought her so early down, the arrangement of two great bowls of
wild ferns and vines which a servant had just placed on either end of
the low mantlepiece.

"We brought them in from Archer's Glen on the way home," she told him
over her shoulder, her hands busy with deft, quick touches. She was all
in white, which took a pearly lustre from the lamps, and for the moment
she was as beautiful as Peter believed her. A tiny unfinished phrase of
the song floated half consciously from her lips as a bubble. "They look
better so, don't you think?" As she stood off to measure the effect, it
seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so
men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going
on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its
moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her
welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up to her.

It was not all at once he saw it so. He kept watching her all that
evening as one watches a perfect thing, a bird or a dancer, sensing in
the slim turn of her ankle, the lithe throat, the delicate perfume that
she shook from her summer draperies, so many strokes of a master hand.
She was evidently on terms with the Lessings which permitted her
acceptance of him at the family valuation, but the perfection of her
method was such that it never quite sunk his identity as