“No bother. Let me just fetch my bag.” And the man excused himself and entered the House.

His wife turned a worried face to Mrs. French. “Is it serious?” she asked.

“I cannot tell; Cook appears to be in some kind of stupefied trance.” And she followed the doctor into the House.

“Oh dear,” sighed Mrs. Lewes.

“How wonderful it is,” Mama mused aloud, “to find that the loss of a local girl and boy can so affect the summer people.”

“Libby!”

She raised her eyes to meet Papa’s horrified expression. For a moment, she regarded him, and then she turned wordlessly away and picked up her shawl from off the arm of the settee and rose.

“Poor Cook,” I said to no one in particular, recalling her greeting to me only the evening before.

Mama hesitated an instant on the threshold of the front door, her back very straight, and then she turned round. “Yes indeed,” she agreed quietly. “She has lost her child.”

And though she had directed her reply to Papa, he seemed not to have heard, so Mama turned again and passed into the hall. Papa was silent a moment, and then he, too, departed into the House. Only Mrs. Lewes remained behind, sunk in thoughts of her own, and then, without a word to me, she drifted past and down onto the lawn, where she took up a chair by the rocks and settled. I watched her pull a book from her pocket and, leaning, commence to write.

Halcy! my heart cried. Halcy Ames! It was you!

Far away, at the base of the harbor, stretched the white flank of Middle Haven. And though I could name the neat fronts of every house—Brown, Ames, Calderwood, Beverage, Warren, Vinal, names familiar as the pulls upon each door—I knew the doors would not swing open for a summer visitor such as me. House after house after house, the white faces of the town repeated upon the black harbor like palms held up to stave off my groping entry, the broad beam of the townsmen’s smiles like the uncommunicative slant of sun upon those sturdy walls.

And Grange House, too, had long seemed closed to me in this way, but that morning a deathblow was struck to the baseboard of the place, and I heard the keening brought upon a small wind through the crack. For I had been at the window when Halcy’s ghost had come and stood—and waved.

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Everyone, guest and servant, passed through the morning quietly as we could, and the hubbub at Grange House softened to a hum. Dr. Lewes, it appeared, was a mesmerist as well as a physician, and deducing that Cook would not wake without extreme measure, he spoke to her in her trance, coaxing her stunned mind back into its consciousness; Halcy’s short letter remained crushed in her hand: