nce he exclaimed irrelevantly:

"Where, Julia, did that portrait come from?" And when he caught
the intensity of her stare, he looked around the walls, and, smiling
bashfully, concealed his embarrassment by saying, "I'm really listening,
but I must have dozed for a second." At times he would gaze wonderingly
at the ceiling, lose himself following the lines of the panels, or
counting the little square panes in the window-sashes. He sometimes
slept, but not quite soundly; half his somnolence was busy with
irrational calculations beyond his control.

A musty smell elusively kept fading as soon as he was aware of
breathing it; a dim room, in which the windows were shut close and
the shades pulled down, drifted through his quick fancy into darkness;
he would find himself deliriously sorting many strange garments into
piles, counting them, opening drawers to take others out, until the
accumulations drove him to despair. His right hand throbbed under the
tight bandage; he kept fingering the bandage and pressing on the sore
spots. Everything about him would seem suddenly definite and real as
compared with the dismal bewilderment of his dreamings. Perhaps the
doctor would enter, with professional cheerfulness. But then, right
in the middle of answering some question, Hastings would be blinded
by a great rush of bright light through the opened door.

A day came when all this phantasmagoria ceased to bother him; with
returning vigor he had to make less and less effort to forget it,
until at last it altogether went. The joy of new health swept over
him, filling the gaps and low, miasmic areas of his mentality, as
the rising tide fills the empty pools of the shore.

III

It was a month after the day of John Hastings's arrival at Rockface.
Unlike that day, the weather was sunny and mild; big cumulus clouds
moved languidly through the sky, as if it were midsummer instead of
late October. Julia was crocheting, and he was watching her. They
were sitting in front of the house on a leaf-strewn grass-plot near
the avenue between the lines of larches that, now calm in the windless
forenoon, stretched diagonally from the street to the corners of the
bland old facade.

"But if you knew all along," he, with his habitual freshness of wonder,
put to her, "that it was, that it _is_, really Mr. Eberdeen's house, why
in the name of things didn't you tell me _then_?"

She became irritatingly absorbed in her work.

"I thought," she at len