"We break at last into incidents. A young friend of the impossible name of Deshman helps evolve the story; he comes to stay; he seems to feel the influence from the outset, he cannot sleep, he wanders about the house.... Do others know? _Others?_... The gardener takes to revisiting the gardens after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery with an unaccountable spade in his hand and answers huskily. Why should a gardener carry a spade? Why should he answer huskily? Why should the presence, the doubt, the sense of something else elusively in the air about them, become intensified at the encounter? Oh! conceivably of course in many places, but just _there_! As some sort of protection, it may be.... Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish sits at his lonely but beautifully served dinner he becomes aware for the first time of a change in Mutimer. [Illustration: _Mutimer at the end of a year._] "Something told him in that instant that Mutimer also _knew_.... "Deshman comes again with a new and disconcerting habit of tapping the panelling and measuring the thickness of the walls when he thinks no one is looking, and then a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a woman, yet not so much a woman as a disembodied intelligence in a feminine costume with one of those impalpable relationships with Deshman that people have with one another in the world of Henry James, an association of shadows, an atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish walks about the shrubbery with the friend, elaborately getting at it--whatever it is--and in front of them, now hidden by the yew hedges, now fully in view, walks Deshman with the married and settled sister of Mr. Blandish.... "'So,' said Mr. Blandish, pressing the point down towards the newly discovered sensitiveness, 'where we feel, he it seems _knows_.' "She seemed to consider. "'He doesn't know completely,' was her qualification. "'But he has something--something tangible.' "'If he can make it tangible.' "On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played for a time. "'Then it isn't altogether tangible yet?' "'It isn't tangible enough for him to go upon.' "'Definitely something.' "Her assent was mutely concise. "'That we on our part----?' "The _we_ seemed to trouble her. "'He knows more than you do,' she yielded. "The gesture, the half turn, the momentary halt in the paces of Mr. Blandish, plied her further. "'More, I think, than he has admitted--to any one.' "'Even to you?' "He perceived an interesting wave of irritation. 'Even to me,' he had wrung from her, but at the price of all further discussion.