If Mrs. Willoughby read him aright, the tragic thing
affected him like the first trumpet-note of doom. It was as if he saw
the house he had built with so much calculation beginning to tumble
down--laid low by some dread power to which he was holding up his hands.
He was holding up his hands not merely in petition, but in propitiation.
She was not blind to the fact that there was a measure of propitiation
in his boarding and lodging her husband and herself. He clung to them
because his desolation needed something that stood for old friendship to
cling to; but in addition to that he had dim visions of the dread power
that had smitten Claude looming up behind them and acting somehow on
their behalf.

"It's all very well to insist that there's nothing to retribute," ran a
passage in one of the letters, "but the poor fellow is saying one thing
with his lips and another in his soul. What's the play in which the
ghosts come back? Is it "Hamlet," or "Macbeth," or one of Ibsen's? Well,
it's like that. He's seeing ghosts. He wants us to be on hand because we
persuade him that they're not there--that they can't be there, so long
as we're all on friendly terms, and that we're not laying up anything
against him. The very fact that he pays our bills makes him hope that
the ghosts will keep away."

"We've promised to go back with them," she informed her daughter
elsewhere. "For one thing, Ena needs me. If I didn't go she'd have to
have a nurse; and I'd rather not leave her till she's safe in your
hands. I must say I can't make her out. She puzzles me more than Archie
does. Now that a week has gone by and the first shock is over, she's
like a person coming out of a trance. She's so sweet and gentle that
it's positively weird. Of course she's always been sweet--that's her
style--but not in this way. Upon my word, I don't know whether she has a
soul or not--whether she never had one, or whether one is being born in
her. But she's patient, and you might even say resigned. There's no
question about that. She's not a bit hard to take care of, making little
or no demand, and just trying to get up strength enough to sail. She's
grieving over Claude; and yet her grief has the touching quality in it
that you get from a sweet old tune. I must say I don't understand
it--_not in her_."

It was when she was able to announce that Mrs. Masterman was well enough
to sail that Mrs. Willoughby acknowledged the first letters from her
daughter. "We go b