A beautiful smile of tenderness, of something ineffably feminine, came into her eyes. What was it she gazed at in that instant of silence? “Hush, dear. Don’t talk!” she said, softly, kissing him on the brow. “Go and sit again by the gate of horn.” THE WHITE DOG Mr. Gilchrist was nervous and fidgety. He was alone, not merely in the dining-room where he sat, but in the house; and solitude at night to a man accustomed to find comfort and distraction in the presence of others is a black desert where one starts at one’s own footsteps. Sitting there in the dining-room of the pretty suburban villa he had had built some twenty miles from town, the familiar objects which surrounded him seemed to have grown remote, unfamiliar. Smoking his pipe, with the half-read newspaper on his knee, his ear was worried by the insistent ticking of the clock, and this ticking seemed a novel, almost uncanny, phenomenon. He could not remember having heard a sound from that timepiece before. There were features about the sideboard, too, as he gazed at it fixedly, that appeared quite strange to him. Certain details of inlay-work on the Sheraton-pattern legs he perceived now for the first time. These little unfamiliarities observed with his mind on the stretch--the latent primitive man in him scenting danger in solitude--added to the loneliness. The sheltering walls of the usual were pushed away from him. He felt himself exposed, out of the call of friends, in a desolation hinted by invisible malevolences. Of course, the feeling was absurd. He shook himself and tried to summon up a little of the bravura with which he had dismissed his wife and daughter to the dance at the village a mile away, making light of their protests that it was the one servant’s evening out, saying that at any rate she in the kitchen would not be much company to him in the dining-room where he proposed to sit and smoke. His friend Williamson might drop in, too--anyway, he would be all right. His friend Williamson had not dropped in, and with every slow minute ticked out by that confounded clock he had found himself less at ease. Once he got up and walked into another room, but the sound of his own footsteps, heard with astonishing loudness in the house empty of any other person, afflicted his nerves, and he returned to his former seat in the dining-room.