A musty smell elusively kept fading as soon as he was aware of breathing it; a dim room, in which the windows were shut close and the shades pulled down, drifted through his quick fancy into darkness; he would find himself deliriously sorting many strange garments into piles, counting them, opening drawers to take others out, until the accumulations drove him to despair. His right hand throbbed under the tight bandage; he kept fingering the bandage and pressing on the sore spots. Everything about him would seem suddenly definite and real as compared with the dismal bewilderment of his dreamings. Perhaps the doctor would enter, with professional cheerfulness. But then, right in the middle of answering some question, Hastings would be blinded by a great rush of bright light through the opened door. A day came when all this phantasmagoria ceased to bother him; with returning vigor he had to make less and less effort to forget it, until at last it altogether went. The joy of new health swept over him, filling the gaps and low, miasmic areas of his mentality, as the rising tide fills the empty pools of the shore. III It was a month after the day of John Hastings's arrival at Rockface. Unlike that day, the weather was sunny and mild; big cumulus clouds moved languidly through the sky, as if it were midsummer instead of late October. Julia was crocheting, and he was watching her. They were sitting in front of the house on a leaf-strewn grass-plot near the avenue between the lines of larches that, now calm in the windless forenoon, stretched diagonally from the street to the corners of the bland old façade. "But if you knew all along," he, with his habitual freshness of wonder, put to her, "that it was, that it _is_, really Mr. Eberdeen's house, why in the name of things didn't you tell me _then_?" She became irritatingly absorbed in her work. "I thought," she at length said, "that you were pretending not to know, and I wanted, in that case, to discover what other--what else you might be holding back from me." "Holding back from you? What _else_?" he echoed. "What else was there?" "I wasn't sure, you see. Nothing that I knew," she affirmed frankly, laughing away the sudden rigor of sadness on his face. "There was another reason, though. There was something which I had been saving for the very last moment to show you. But I was rather ashamed of wanting to so much, and, after the way you had taken the rest of the house, I hesitated. Just as I finally was going to, lunch was ready--remember?" Hastings awkwardly withdrew his right hand, which had been resting palm downward on his knee, and thrust it into his pocket. "Julia," he cried out, in characteristic disregard of all context, "suppose Mr. Eberdeen should turn out to have been--well--a relative, or something? It might account, you know, for my asking that question, and--and for how everything here"--he looked inclusively round him--"for how this all impressed me so."