One day he put his pen down, dismayed to find that—as so often before—he did not know his subject well enough to go on. His mind wandered back to his first sight of the Willows, when he had come there with Laura Lou and Upton. He had recalled, then, waking in the night years before at Euphoria, as a little boy, and hearing the bell of the Roman Catholic church toll the hour. That solemn reverberation, like the note of Joshua's trumpet, had made the walls of the present fall, and the little boy had reached back for the first time into the past. His first sight of the Willows had renewed that far-off impression; he had felt that the old house was full of muffled reverberations which his hand might set going if he could find the rope… . Since then the years had passed, and he had learned many things. His hand was nearer the rope—he was "warm," as the children said. But when he tried to evoke the Elinor Lorburn who had waltzed in the ballroom and wreathed her hair with flowers before her tilted toilet mirror the dumb walls remained dumb … he could not wake them… .

The meagreness of his inherited experience, the way it had been torn off violently from everything which had gone before, again struck him with a pang of impoverishment. On the Fourth of July, at Advance and then at Euphoria, the orators of the day (and Grandpa Scrimser foremost among them) had been much given to dilating on the priceless qualities the pioneers had brought with them into the wilderness. To Vance it sometimes seemed that they had left the rarest of all behind… .

He fancied he heard a step in the shadows and glanced up from his writing. "Vance!" Halo Tarrant exclaimed. She was standing there, in the doorway of the drawing room, with a look so amazed that Vance, jumping to his feet, lost his own sense of surprise in the shock of hers. "Why I thought you were in Europe!" he said.

"I was to have been." She coloured slightly. "And then, at the last minute, I didn't go." She moved a step nearer. "You hadn't heard I was at Eaglewood?"

"No. I didn't know."

She smiled a little. "Well, I didn't know you were at the Willows. But just now, in passing the gate, I saw it was open—" (Oh, curse it, Vance thought—how could he have forgotten the padlock?) "and as I knew it wasn't Mrs. Tracy's day I came in to see who was here."

Her eyes were fixed on him with a looked which seemed to call for an explanation, and he mumbled: "Mrs. Tracy's been sick… ."

"I know; I'm sorry. And you're replacing her?"