She disappeared in the spectral shadows of the drawing room, and Vance heard her heels rapping lightly across the hall, and through unknown rooms and passages beyond. He sat motionless where she had left him, his elbows propped on the table, the book still open before him, his head pressed between his hands, letting the strangeness of the place and the hour envelop him like the falling light.

It was dusk in the book-lined room when he was roused by Upton's hobbledehoy tread and a tap on the shoulder. "What's become of you? I guess you've been sound asleep," his cousin challenged him.

Vance sat upright with a start. "No, I haven't been asleep." He got to his feet and looked about him. "Where's Miss Spear?"

"Miss Halo? Oh, did you see her? She's gone long ago. A gentleman friend called for her in his car. I don't know where they went. She never stays anywhere more than five minutes." Vance was silent, and Upton added: "Say, come along; Laura Lou's waiting. Time to lock up."

Vance reluctantly followed his cousin. As they left the house he realized that, instead of seizing the opportunity to explore every nook of it, he had sat all the afternoon in one room, and merely dreamed of what he might have seen in the others. But that was always his way: the least little fragment of fact was enough for him to transform into a palace of dreams, whereas if he tried to grasp more of it at a time it remained on his hands as so much unusable reality.

Chapter 2

Three men and two ladies were sitting on the shabby paintless verandah at Eaglewood at the end of a summer afternoon.

The place was full of the signs of comfortable but disorderly use. A low table was spread with tea things, a teapot of one make, cups of another, plates with fragments of stale-looking cake and cold toast. There were willow armchairs, some disabled and mended with string, but all provided with gaily striped cushions which had visibly suffered from sun and rain; there were also long deck chairs with tattered plaids or Indian blankets on them, and more cushions strewn on the floor, among a litter of magazines and newspapers. In one corner stood a tall earthen jar with branches of blossoming plum and shadbush, in another an easel with a study blocked out in charcoal, and everywhere were trails of ashes, and little accumulations of cigar and cigarette ends.

The low-studded old house of gray stone was throned on the mountainside so high above Paul's Landing that those who sat on the verandah missed the dispiriting sight of the town and of the cement works below, and saw only, beyond the precipitate plunge of many-tinted forest, the great sweep of the Hudson, and the cliffs on its other shore.