We had noticed, with annoyance, the presence at the tea of two intruders who were not potential characters. These intruders Mrs. Van Suydam now summoned. We did not see by what method she summoned them; when she summoned anyone, that person felt it in the air, possibly. But we heard her say to the young man “I shall be obliged if you will fetch my son.” Anthony Bloodgood was always in a state of high enjoyment; he laughed with his hazel eyes, and smiled with his too-small mouth over which he wore a little moustache because to twirl its speculative ends gave him something to do. He stood tugging at the ridiculous moustache. It was plain that he did not wish to do as she had requested. But she got the better of him. And then she obviously grew more and more uneasy. She sat tensely, looking at one spot on the wall. But by the steady flicker of her black bonnet against the sunset outside the window I saw that she was trembling. Often as I have seen Mrs. Van Suydam since my return to New York, I shall always think of her as she was that afternoon: her bonnet trembling against the sunset and her feet curiously still. And suddenly she laughed, that aged laugh with a cracked high cackling in it. She was laughing at herself for trembling. The girl, Gertrude Cuyler, sat beside her on the sofa; and she sighed. It was the kind of sigh that sinks into the imagination as an ominous thing. The older woman took it as being personal to her as well as to the girl; the long breath that she drew was the suppression of a sigh as deep as the girl’s. They did not look at each other. Anthony Bloodgood came back, his eyes wary now. He said: “Nick’s coming. He didn’t know you were to be here. He was talking to Eva Litchfield.” It was a case of the individual against life. I acknowledge that I ran away. I heard afterwards that Eva married the son shortly after I left America. The elder Mrs. Van Suydam had a marvellous power of waiting: was she waiting for what seemed to her the inevitable end of such a mating? Eva, I knew, could not wait; her interest was a bright flame that scorched, and burned, and defeated its end. In Molly Underhill’s telephonic chatter I had detected a dark undercurrent, a play of her fancy over what partly fed her liking for the gossip that is a dismembering of one’s friends and partly shook her. If the same chilly finger had been drawn down her spine and Eva’s she could not more surely have flinched.