Bored and exhausted, she fell asleep almost at once, to dream vividly. In her dream, she stood outside a closed door, knowing that something unspeakably horrid lay beyond it. Terror paralysed her. At last she pushed at the door, but it would not yield more than an inch or two. Something was behind it. She looked down and saw a dark stain spreading round her feet, oozing from beneath the resistant door. Screaming and sweating, Elsie woke up, and as she did so the remembrance came back to her in full of everything that the clairvoyante had said that morning. II “Hallo, Elsie!” “Hallo, Geraldine!” “You’re quite a stranger, aren’t you? I think it’s about a year since we had the honour of seeing your majesty last.” “Well, now I have come, aren’t you going to take the trouble to invite me to come in?” asked Elsie good-humouredly. “There’s a visitor of mine in the drawing-room.” “Who is it? Aunt Ada?” “No, not Aunt Ada, Miss Smarty. It’s a friend of mine, I tell you, who I knew at the office during the war.” “Well, you can introduce me to her, I suppose,” said Elsie carelessly. She noticed that Geraldine’s hair was not, as it generally was, in curling-pins, and that she was wearing a new dress, of an unbecoming shade of emerald green. Geraldine always went wrong over her clothes, Elsie reflected complacently. She herself wore a new black picture hat, and it was partly from the desire to show herself in it that she had come to her old home. “Where’s mother?” “Out.” “What a mercy!” Elsie walked into the familiar drawing-room, feeling glad that she no longer lived at Hillbourne Terrace, under her mother’s dominion, and forced to share a bedroom with the fretful Geraldine. A young man of two- or three-and-twenty was sitting in the drawing-room, and rose to his feet as Elsie and Geraldine came in. “This is my sister, Mrs. Horace Williams. Elsie, this is my friend, Mr. Morrison,” said Geraldine with pride. Elsie was immediately conscious of a quickened interest. The young man was of a type that appealed strongly to her; dark and tall, with very brown eyes, and a wistful, ingenuous smile that was the more noticeable because he was clean-shaven. When they shook hands, she was conscious of the slight, unmistakable thrill of mutual magnetism. “I thought I was going to find a young lady in here, when Geraldine told me she had a friend!” Elsie exclaimed, laughing. “Sorry I’m a disappointment,” Mr. Morrison replied, also laughing. “Oh, I didn’t say that. Only my sister doesn’t have gentlemen friends as a rule,” Elsie declared innocently. Geraldine’s sallow face flushed. “You don’t know much about it, do you, considering that we never see you nowadays. I’m not one for talking much about my own affairs, either, so far as I’m aware. It’s a misfortune, really, to be as reserved as I am. I often wish I wasn’t!”