urely sitting doll. Essie had been her
favorite doll when she was younger. Of course now that she was fourteen
she did not play with dolls any more. But it was permissible that she
keep her old friend neatly dressed and ever at hand as a confidant. She
smiled at the thought. Essie never tattled.

"It must be from that polio," she told Essie, knowing all the time that
she was almost well now and needed plenty of rest and careful doses of
exercise. "It makes my eyes--funny."

Essie smiled back glassily and Ruth laughed. It was good to awaken and
see the thick black arms of the maple tree outside the windows. It was
good to have the cool green leaves waving at her, and see the filtered
dapplings of sunshine cross and recross them.

She loved that old tree. She had played among its long horizontal
branches from childhood. Her brother, Alex, who had been killed in the
Normandy Landing during World War Three, had loved the tree too. He had
built the railed, shingled-roofed little nest high up in the tree's
crotched heart where Ruth kept some of her extra-special notes and
jewelry and a book of poems.

One of the two paintings on the bedroom walls was of the old tree. The
tree dominated the old story-and-a-half white house with the green
shutters that was the Halseys' home. Her home. Alex had painted that
picture as well as the other showing the graceful loop of the river and
the roofs of the village of Thayer in the distance. Ruth had been with
him as he painted that second picture from the jutting rock ledge five
hundred feet above the river.

"I was just ten then, Essie," she chirped gaily. "I remember how afraid
I was of the height and how Alex scolded."

But Alex was dead now and all she had to remember of him was the
paintings and the photographs that Mother kept in a battered brown
leather folder. For a moment the bright sunlight in her beloved maple
tree's leaves seemed to dim and the room wavered about her. She wondered
about that. She must tell her father or her mother.

Perhaps the polio, light touch of it or not, had hurt her eyesight.
Glasses! She shuddered at the thought.

The room shimmered and blurred--and suddenly broke apart to reform into
something.... She squinched her eyes shut to the hideous vision. And
then opened them the merest slit.

Nothing had changed....

"MOTHER!" she cried. "Daddy!" she cried. "What has happened?"

She heard the door to--to this hideous travesty of a room opening. He