y in her place behind the coffeepot. Vere sat
opposite her at the round table. They were holding hands across the
rolls and bacon and eggs, their glances interlocked in a shining content
that made my solitariness rather drab and dull to my own contemplation.
At my clumsy step the picture dissolved, of course. Vere rose while
Phillida welcomed me to my chair and went into a young housewife's
pretty solicitude about my fruit and hot eggs.

The sun glinted across the table. The very servant had a smiling air of
enjoying the occasion. I never had a more pleasant breakfast. A big
brindle cat purred on the window-sill beside Phillida; no dainty Persian
or Angora, but a battered veteran whose nicked ears and scarred tail
proved him a battling cat of ring experience.

"I planned to have a wee white kitten," Phil explained, while putting a
saucer of milk before the feline tough. "One that would wear a ribbon,
you know. You remember, Cousin Roger, how Mother always forbade pets
because she believed animals carry germs? I meant to have a puss, if
ever I had a home of my own. This one just walked into the kitchen on
the first day we came here. Ethan said it was a lucky sign when a cat
came to a new home. He gave it the meat out of his sandwiches that we
had brought for lunch, and it stayed. So I decided to keep it instead of
a kitten. It really is more cat!"

What footing was here for dreary terrors? In a mirror across the room I
glimpsed my own countenance looking quite as usual. No over-night white
hairs appeared; no upstanding look such as the legend gave to Sir
Sintram after he met the Little Master.

After the meal, Vere asked me to walk over to the lake with him.

We strolled through the old orchard toward the dam. This was my side of
the house. In passing, I looked up at the window against which the Thing
had seemed to press Itself with sickening lust for me. Phillida was
framed in the open square, and shook a dustcloth at us by way of
greeting and evidence of her busyness.

The wide, shallow lake lay almost without movement, except at the head
of the dam. There the water poured over with foam and tumult, an
amber-brown cataract some twenty-odd feet across, to rush on below in a
winding stream that grew calmer as it flowed.

"We must put our lake in order, Vere," I observed, as we stood on a
knoll at the head of the dam. "All this growth of rank vegetation ought
to be pulled up, the banks graded and turfed perhaps, th