ll liked
her. Yet he, himself, felt a sort of growing repugnance to her which he
would have been hard put to it to explain. Indeed, the only way he could
explain it--and he had thought a good deal about it the last few
days--was that she undoubtedly possessed an uncanny power of starting
into life images which had lain long dormant in his brain.

For one thing--but that, of course, might not be entirely Bubbles'
fault--Milly, his poor wife, had become again terribly real to him. It
was almost as if he felt her to be alive, say, in the next room--lying,
as she had been wont to lie, listening for his footsteps, in the little
watering place where they had spent the last few weeks of her life.

He could not but put down that unpleasant, sinister phenomenon to the
presence of Bubbles, for he had been at Wyndfell Hall all the summer,
and though the place had been Milly's birthplace--where, too, she had
spent her melancholy, dull girlhood--no thought of her had ever come to
disturb his pleasure in the delightful, perfect house and its enchanting
garden. Of course, now and again some neighbour with whom he had made
acquaintance would say a word to him indicating what a strange, solitary
life the Faunceys, father and daughter, had led in their beautiful home,
and how glad the speaker was that "poor Milly" had had a little
happiness before she died. To these remarks he, Varick, would of course
answer appropriately, with that touch of sad reminiscence which carries
with it no real regret or sorrow.

But during the last few days it had been otherwise. He could not get
Milly out of his mind, and he had come to feel that if this peculiar
sensation continued, he would not be able to bring himself to stay on at
Wyndfell Hall after the break-up of his present party.

This feeling of his dead wife's presence had first become intolerably
vivid in the village school-room during the children's Christmas Day
treat. At one time--so the clergyman had told him--Milly had had a
sewing-class for the village girls in that very room; but the class had
not been a success, and she had given it up after a few weeks. That was
her only association with the ugly little building, and yet--and yet,
once he had got well into his speech, he had suddenly _felt her to be
there_--and it was not the gentle, fretful, adoring Milly he had known,
but a Presence which seemed filled with an awful, clear-eyed knowledge
of certain secret facts which his reasoning fa