did not mean _that_! Only, do tell me what the perfume is?"

"I was going to ask if you knew."

"No. Something very expensive and imported, I suppose. Perhaps whoever
gave it to you had it made for herself alone, as some wealthy women do.
It is the most clinging, yet delicately refreshing scent I ever met."

"Tuberose," suggested Vere.

"Drawls, no. How can you? Like an old-fashioned funeral!" she cried.

"Tuberose didn't always go to funerals," he corrected her teasingly, as
she made a face at him. "I remember them growing in my Aunt Bathsheba's
garden. Creamy looking posies, kind of kin to a gardenia, seems to me!
Thick-petalled, like white plush, and holding their sweet smell
everlastingly. But Mr. Locke's perfumery isn't just that, either. There
was something else grew in that garden--I can't call to mind what I
mean. Basil, maybe?"

"The basil plant, that feeds on dead men's brains," quoted Phil with a
mock shiver. "You _are_ happy in your ideals, Drawls!"

He laughed.

"Well, that garden smelled pretty fine when the dew was just warming up
in the sun, mornings--and so does this little gilt ball! I'll guess Mr.
Locke's lady never got it from France. Smells like old New England."

There was no reason why a vague chill should creep over me, or the
sunshine seem to darken as if a thin veil drifted between me and the
surrounding brightness. Let me say again that no place could have been
more unlike the traditional haunted house. There hung about it no sense
of morbidity or depression. Yet, what was I to think? I was not sick or
mad; and the Thing had come to me twice. I turned from the married
lovers and made my way to the veranda, where I might be alone to
consider the pomander whose perfume was like a diaphanous presence
walking beside me.

Seated there, in one of the deep willow-chairs Phillida had cushioned in
peacock chintz and marked especially mine by laying my favorite
magazines on its arm, I studied my new trophy of the night. There was a
satisfaction in its material solidity. It was real enough, resting in my
palm.

Yes; but it was not ordinary among its quaint kind! As I picked out the
design of the gold-work, that fact was borne in upon my mind. Here was
no pattern of scroll or blossom or cupids and hearts. The small sphere
was belted with the signs of the Zodiac, beautiful in minute perfection.
All the rest of the globe was covered with lace-fine work repeating one
group of characters over and