Halo had purposely avoided the new caretakers' day. She wanted the place to herself; there were ghosts of her own there now… . She felt her way in among the familiar obscurities. That looming darkness on her right was the high Venetian cabinet in the hall; this spectral conclave on which a pale starlight twinkled down was the group of shrouded armchairs in confabulation under the prisms of the drawing room chandelier. Capricious rays, slanting through the shutters, seemed to pick out particular objects for her attention, like searchlights groping for landmarks over a night landscape. She fancied the inanimate things assisted in the search, beckoning to the light, and whispering: Here, here! in their wistful striving for reanimation. There was no amount of psychic sensibility one could not read into the walls and furniture of an old empty house… .

Her own youth was in it everywhere, hanging in faded shreds like the worn silk of the curtains—her youth, already far-off and faded, though she was now only twenty-eight! As she stood in the library she recalled her first meeting with Vance Weston—how she had strolled in on one of her perfunctory visits and surprised an unknown youth in Elinor Lorburn's armchair, his hair swept back untidily from a brooding forehead, his eyes bent on a book; and how, at her approach, he had lifted those eyes, without surprise or embarrassment, but with a deep inward look she was always to remember, and had asked eagerly: "Who wrote this?" How like Vance! It was always so with him. No time for preambles—always dashing straight to the vital matter, whether it were the authorship of "Kubla Khan," or the desperate longing to kiss her… . She shut her eyes a moment, and listened to that cry: "You don't understand—I want to kiss you!" He thought she didn't understand—so much the better… .