There are some people the doors of whose minds are absolutely closed on the past; we call them material and practical people; there are others in which the doors of division are a wee crack open, or even ajar, so that their lives are more or less haunted by whisperings from that strange land we call yesterday. In some of the Burmese and Japanese children the doors stand wide open so that they can see themselves as they were before they passed through the change called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl's mind as a child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollections of forgotten gods once worshipped had stolen, and that the power of the Ju-ju and the Druids' stone lay in their power of focussing those vague and wandering threads of remembrance. To-night this power seemed regained, for she passed from the contemplation of concrete images into a vague and pleasant state, an absolute idleness of the intellect akin to that which people call daydreaming. With her cloak wrapped round her she sat, elbows on knees and her chin in the palms of her hands giving herself up to Nothing before starting to resume her way to the house. Sitting like this she suddenly started and turned. Some one had called her: "Phylice!" For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew that it was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we are half asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as the ringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who has never spoken. She rose up and resumed her way, striking along the glen to the open park, yet still the memory of that call pursued her. "Phylice!" It seemed Mr. Pinckney's voice, it _was_ his voice, she was sure of that now, and she amused herself by wondering why his voice had suddenly popped up in her head. She had been thinking about him more than about any one else that evening and that easily accounted for the matter. Fancy had mimicked him--yet why did Fancy use her name and clothe it in Pinckney's voice?--and it was distinctly a call, the call of a person who wishes to draw another person's attention. Pinckney had never called her by her name and she felt almost irritated at the impertinence of the phantom voice in doing so. This same irritation made her laugh when she realised it. Then the idea that Byrne might lock the hall door before she could get back drove every other thought away and she began to run, her shadow running before her over the moonlit grass. Half way across the sward, which was divided from the grass land proper by a Ha-ha, she heard the stable clock striking eleven. CHAPTER IV When Phyl withdrew from the dining-room, Hennessey filled his glass with port, Pinckney, who took no wine, lit a cigarette and the two men drew miles closer to one another in conversation.