Somehow, Lindsay had never even thought of Lutetia's grave. The next day he made that pilgrimage. The graveyard lay near the town center, overtopped by the pine-covered hill which bore three austere white buildings--church, town-hall, and grange. The grave itself was in a patch of modern tombstones, surrounded by the flaking slabs of two centuries ago. The stone was featureless, ill-proportioned; the inscription recorded nothing but her name and the dates of her birth and death. The note which most often came out of these wayside gossipings was a high one--of the gaiety and the brilliancy of the Blue Meadows hospitality. Apparently people were coming and going all the time; some distinguished; some undiscovered: but all with personality. When Lindsay returned from such a talk, the old house glowed like an opal--so full did it seem of the colors of those vivacious days. But he was not quite content to be long away from his own fireside. The friendly atmosphere of the Murray house continued to exercise its enchanting sway. He always felt that one room became occupied the instant he left it, that the one he was about to enter was already occupied--and this feeling grew day by day, augmented. It brought him back to the house always with a sense of expectancy. "Lutetia's house is my hotel-lobby, my movie, my theater, my grand opera, my cabaret," he wrote Spink. "There's a strange fascination about it--a fascination with an element of eternal promise." At times, when he entered the trellised doorway, he found himself expecting someone to come forward to greet him. It kept occurring to him that a neighbor had stopped to call, was waiting inside for him. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would drift slowly out of a delicious sleep to a sense, equally delicious, of being most gently and lovingly companioned in the room; sometimes in the morning he would wake up with a snap, as though the house were full of company. For a moment the whole place would seem brilliant and gay, and then--it was as though a bubble burst in the air--he was alone. "It's almost as good," he wrote Spink, "as though you were here yourself, you goggle-eyed hick, you!" Once or twice he caught himself talking aloud; addressing the empty air. He stifled this impulse, however. "People always have a tendency to get bughouse," he explained to Spink, "when they live alone. I used to do that in your rooms. I'm going to try to keep sane as long as possible."