he
deserted street. The houses were all asleep, and the college buildings
dark as empty fortresses. The moon-threaded mist clung closely to the
town like a shroud of gauze, not concealing the form beneath, but
making its immobility more mysterious. The trees drooped and dripped
with moisture, and the leaves seemed ready, almost longing, to fall at
a touch. It was one of those nights when the solid things of the
world, the houses and the hills and the woods and the very earth
itself, grow unreal to the point of vanishing; while the impalpable
things, the presences of life and death which travel on the unseen
air, the influences of the far-off starry lights, the silent messages
and presentiments of darkness, the ebb and flow of vast currents of
secret existence all around us, seem so close and vivid that they
absorb and overwhelm us with their intense reality.

Through this realm of indistinguishable verity and illusion, strangely
imposed upon the familiar, homely street of Calvinton, the machine ran
smoothly, faintly humming, as the Frenchman drove it with
master-skill--itself a dream of embodied power and speed. Gliding by
the last cottages of Town's End where the street became the highroad,
the car ran swiftly through the open country for a mile until it came
to a broad entrance. The gate was broken from the leaning posts and
thrown to one side. Here the machine turned in and laboured up a
rough, grass-grown carriage-drive.

Carmichael knew that they were at Castle Gordon, one of the "old
places" of Calvinton, which he often passed on his country drives. The
house stood well back from the road, on a slight elevation, looking
down over the oval field that was once a lawn, and the scattered elms
and pines and Norway firs that did their best to preserve the memory
of a noble plantation. The building was colonial; heavy stone walls
covered with yellow stucco; tall white wooden pillars ranged along a
narrow portico; a style which seemed to assert that a Greek temple was
good enough for the residence of an American gentleman. But the clean
buff and white of the house had long since faded. The stucco had
cracked, and, here and there, had fallen from the stones. The paint on
the pillars was dingy, peeling in round blisters and narrow strips
from the grey wood underneath. The trees were ragged and untended, the
grass uncut, the driveway overgrown with weeds and gullied by
rains--the whole place looked forsaken. Carmichael had