of revulsion from her mother's hectoring
domestic methods, or of consciousness that outsiders might rate Vere
below his wife in station and education, so her respect for him must
forbid their slight, I do not know. But I never saw her oppose him or
speak rudely to him before other people. I suppose they may have had the
usual conjugal differings, neither of them being angelic. If so, no
outsider ever glimpsed the fact.

We spoke of nothing serious on that first day. They both showed me the
various improvements finished or progressing, indoors or out.

We dined as agreeably as we had lunched. Quite early, afterward, I
excused myself, and left together the two who were still on their
honeymoon.

At the door of my room, I pushed a wall-switch that lighted
simultaneously three lamps. In this I had repeated the arrangement used
by me for years in my city apartment. I have a demand for light
somewhere in my make-up, and no reason for not indulging it. There
flashed out of the dusk a large lamp upon my writing-table, a tall
floor-lamp beside the piano, and a reading-lamp on a stand beside my bed
at the far end of the room. All three were shaded in a smoke-blue and
rose-color effect that long since had caught my fancy for night work;
the shades inset with imitation semi-precious stones, rough-cut things
of sapphire, tourmaline-pink and baroque pearl.

I lay emphasis upon this, to make clear how normal, serene and even
familiar in effect was the room into which I came. Yet, as I closed the
door behind me and stood in that softly brilliant radiance, a shudder
shook me from head to foot with the violence of an electric shock. A
sense of suffocation caught at my throat like an unseen hand.

Both sensations were gone in the time of a drawn breath, leaving only
astonishment in their wake. Presently I went on with the purpose that
had brought me upstairs; lifting a portfolio to the table and beginning
to unpack the work which I had been doing in New York. As I laid out the
first sheets of music, there drifted to my ears that vague sound from
the lake I had heard on my first night visit here, while I stood on the
tumble-down porch. The sound that was like the smack of glutinous lips,
or some creature drawing itself out of thick, viscid slime. As before, I
wondered what movement of the shallow waters could produce that result.
Not the tide, now, for the new dam was up and the lake cut off from Long
Island Sound. The pouring of the