ting it ready for the post.

She was still engaged in doing so when, the crunching of footsteps
causing her to lift her head, she saw Claude. Having come round to the
side portico on a hint from William Sweetapple, he stood at a little
distance, smiling. He was smiling, but as a dead man might smile. Lois
could neither rise nor speak, from awe. Claude himself could neither
speak nor advance. He stood like a specter--but a specter who has been
in hell. The very smile was that of the specter who has no right to come
out of hell, and yet has come.

Lois was not precisely troubled; she was terrified. If Claude had only
spoken a word or taken a step forward it would have broken the spell
that held her dazed and dumb. But he did nothing. He only stood and
smiled--that awful smile which expressed more anguish than any rictus of
pain. He stood just as he came into sight, on turning the corner of the
house, with the many colors of the rose-bed at his left hand. It was
exactly like this, she had always imagined, that disembodied spirits or
astral forms made their appearances to portend death.

She got possession of her faculties at last. "Claude!" She could just
whisper it.

He continued to smile as he advanced and came up the steps; but it was
not till he was actually beside her that he said, in a voice which might
also have been that of a dead man, "You didn't expect me, did you?"

She remembered afterward that they neither shook hands nor exchanged any
of the usual forms of greeting, but at the minute it didn't seem natural
that they should. Her own tone was as strained as his as she answered,
awesomely: "No. Sit down, Claude. When did you come?"

Throwing his hat on the floor, he dropped wearily into a deck-chair and
closed his eyes. With the sharp profile grown extraordinarily white and
thin, the dead-man expression terrified her again. She wished he would
raise his head and look at her--look more like life. All he did was to
open his eyes heavily, as he replied, "Got back yesterday."

It was less from interest than from the desire to get on the plane of
actual things that she asked, "Where are you staying?"

"Slept at the house last night. Old Maggs, the caretaker, has the key,
so I made him let me in."

"But are you going to stay any time?"

"Might as well. Don't see why not."

There was so much to say and so much she was afraid to say that she
hardly knew with what to begin. "Weren't you," she ventured,
timid