ing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell.
Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose
help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the
horrid thing's hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I
had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected--perhaps he had been shaken by his fall--and I watched the
star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid
vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.

"Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out.
I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still
glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and
dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any
concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I'd seen it
so slowly.

"The man or monster I'd sent away was standing quite still in the middle
of the garden. Oh, we've all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the
dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever
be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in
warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen
bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber's dummy. He stood quite
still, with his face towards me; and I can't tell you how horrid
he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we'd stuck up a waxwork
instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.

"Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran
out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had
undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different
from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt
vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur
more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet
dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was
rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to
Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly,
but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed
to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane.
But when I stared harder, it was