This was where Lutetia Murray wrote the books which had so intrigued his boyish fancy. Mentally he ran over the list: _The Sport of the Goddesses_, _The Weary Time_, _Mary Towle_, _Old Age_, _Intervals_, _With Pitfall and with Gin_, _Cynthia Ware_-- Details came up before his mental vision which he had entirely forgotten and now only half remembered; dramatic moments; descriptive passages; conversational interludes; scenes; epigrams.... He tried to imagine Lutetia Murray at Blue Meadows. The picture which, in college, he had cut from a book-house catalogue, flashed before him; he had found it among his papers. The figure was standing.... He had looked at it only yesterday, but his masculine observation retained no details of the gown except that it left her neck and arms bare. The face was in profile. The curling hair rose to a high mass on her head. The delicate features were _mignonne_, except for the delicious, warm, lusciously cut mouth-- Was she blonde or brunet he wondered. She died at forty-five. To David Lindsay at twenty-two, forty-five had seemed a respectable old age. To David Lindsay at twenty-eight, it seemed almost young. She was dead, of course, when he began to read her. Oh, if he could only have met her! It was a great pity that she had died so young. Her work--he had made a point of this in his thesis--had already swung from an erratic, highly colored first period into a more balanced, carefully characterized second period; was just emerging into a third period that was the union of these two; big and rounded and satisfying. But death had cut that development short. In the last four years Lindsay had seen a great deal of death and often in atrocious form. He had long ago concluded that he had thought on the end of man all the thoughts that were in him. But now, sitting in the scented warmth of Lutetia's trellised doorway, he found that there were still other thoughts which he could think. * * * * * The runabout chugged up the road presently. "Ben waiting long?" the freckled Dick asked with a cheery shamelessness. "No, I've been looking the house over. Wonderful old place, isn't it?" "Don't care much for it myself," Dick answered. "I don't like anything old--old houses or that old truck the summer folks are always buying. Things can't be too new or up-to-date for me." Lindsay did not appear at first to hear this; he was still bemused from the experiences of the afternoon. But as they approached the Arms, he emerged from his daze with a belated reply. "Well, I suppose a lot of people feel the way you do," he remarked vaguely. "Mr. Hyde tells me that the Murray place hasn't been let for fifteen years. I expect the rest of the people around here don't like old houses." "Oh, that ain't the reason the Murray house hasn't let," Dick explained with the scorn of rustic omniscience. "They say it's haunted." * * * * *