them, while Mr. and Mrs. M'Leod stood aside
and adored her.

"Ah! That's the way she always comes back to us," he said. "Pity it
wears off so soon, ain't it? You ought to hear her sing 'With mirth thou
pretty bird.'"

We had the house to face through the evening, and there we neither
laughed nor sung. The gloom fell on us as we entered, and did not shift
till ten o'clock, when we crawled out, as it were, from beneath it.

"It has been bad this summer," said Mrs. M'Leod in a whisper after we
realised that we were freed. "Sometimes I think the house will get up
and cry out--it is so bad."

"How?"

"Have you forgotten what comes after the depression?"

So then we waited about the small fire, and the dead air in the room
presently filled and pressed down upon us with the sensation (but words
are useless here) as though some dumb and bound power were striving
against gag and bond to deliver its soul of an articulate word. It
passed in a few minutes, and I fell to thinking about Mr. Baxter's
conscience and Agnes Moultrie, gone mad in the well-lit bedroom
that waited me. These reflections secured me a night during which I
rediscovered how, from purely mental causes, a man can be physically
sick; but the sickness was bliss compared to my dreams when the birds
waked. On my departure, M'Leod gave me a beautiful narwhal's horn, much
as a nurse gives a child sweets for being brave at a dentist's.

"There's no duplicate of it in the world," he said, "else it would have
come to old Max M'Leod;" and he tucked it into the motor. Miss M'Leod
on the far side of the car whispered, "Have you found out anything, Mr.
Perseus?"

I shook my head.

"Then I shall be chained to my rock all my life," she went on. "Only
don't tell papa."

I supposed she was thinking of the young gentleman who specialised in
South American rails, for I noticed a ring on the third finger of her
left hand.

I went straight from that house to Burry Mills Hydro, keen for the first
time in my life on playing golf, which is guaranteed to occupy the mind.
Baxter had taken me a room communicating with his own, and after lunch
introduced me to a tall, horse-headed elderly lady of decided manners,
whom a white-haired maid pushed along in a bath-chair through the
park-like grounds of the Hydro. She was Miss Mary Moultrie, and she
coughed and cleared her throat just like Baxter. She suffered--she
told me it was a Moultrie castemark--from some obscure form of chro