“Some, I suppose.” I regretted that I had drunk so much. I felt that there was something amiss and could not capture it.

“I mean, do you think hate can kill? There is a story about a woman who makes a doll in the image of another woman and burns it and the woman comes to some dire end, I think. It’s been so long ago that I can’t remember, but lately it’s been haunting me.”

“I don’t believe in that,” I said.

“Where’s Aunt Lucy?” she asked, sitting up. “I want to ask her something. I want her to give me Mercy.”

“What about Kurt? He’d kill her.”

“Kurt? Oh . . .” Although she had poured herself a fourth glass of whiskey, she put it down before it had reached her lips and her face became instantly as pale as moonlight. “Kurt is dead,” she said.

“Dead?”

“He was killed this afternoon . . . run over on the Bedford road.”

“Was he off his leash? Weren’t you with him?”

“No. He had been with me. I was riding. I had been running my horse and he was keeping up with me. Something frightened Chiquita—you know that little Palomino mare?—and she stopped suddenly and reared. Kurt went tearing back, here I thought, but just now, as I was coming up the road, I found him.”

“I wish you hadn’t let him go with you,” I cried. “Why didn’t you follow him? Why were you a whole afternoon going after him, Hopestill? Didn’t you care?”

“I had had a little accident and couldn’t get back. Chiquita threw me.”

Now I saw the riding trousers for the first time, wondered even in my alarm when she had got them to fit her now misshapen body, and my voice issued as a scream. “You are ill, then!”

“Yes, I suppose that I shall be very ill.”

“I must call Philip.” I stumbled to the door.

“Don’t! He’ll think I did it intentionally.” She slipped off her short boots and her damp socks. “And of course I did. I made Chiquita do it. Once, I remembered, she threw me because I was wearing some Indian bracelets which rattled and the sound made her wild. I wore them today.” And she pulled up the sleeve of her raincoat to show me three thin silver bands.

“You hadn’t any right!” I said furiously and ran out and round to the house where, without disturbing Miss Pride, I telephoned Philip in Boston. As I waited for the sound of his voice, I could think of nothing but Hopestill’s nimble feet as they had looked just now on the bare floor. They were somehow aged, for the skin was stretched and blanched and over the sharply knuckled bones, the tracery of veins stood out, blue and vermicular. When I had got Philip and he promised to come at once, I went outside and stood in the drenching rain under an apple tree and over and over again hummed the phrase from The Well-Tempered Clavichord, the favorite of the anonymous block-flute player. And I did not leave my dripping sanctuary until, three-quarters of an hour later, the lights of Philip’s car came bobbing through the trees.