What seized on his fancy and strangely affected his mind was this incessant changing roar of falling water. It must be the Widder, he said to himself, flowing close to the walls. But not until he had had the boldness to lean head and shoulders out of the nearest window did he fully realize how close indeed the Widder was. It came sweeping dark and deep and begreened and full with the early autumnal rains, actually against the lower walls of the house itself, and in the middle suddenly swerved in a black, smooth arch, and tumbled headlong into a great pool, nodding with tall slender water-weeds, and charged in its bubbled blackness here and there with the last crimson of the setting sun. To the left of the house, where the waters floated free again, stood vast, still trees above the clustering rushes; and in glimpses between their spreading boughs lay the far-stretching countryside, now dimmed with the first mists of approaching evening. So absorbed he became as he stood leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye and ear became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint atmosphere of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old house and these prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking dream. When at last he did draw back into the room it was perceptibly darker, and a thin keen shaft of recollection struck across his mind—the recollection of what he was, and of how he came to be there, his reasons for coming and of that dark indefinable presence which like a raven had begun to build its dwelling in his mind. He sat on, his eyes restlessly wandering, his face leaning on his hands; and in a while the door opened and Herbert returned, carrying an old crimson and green teapot and a dish of hot cakes. ‘They’re all out,’ he said; ‘sister, Sallie, and boy; but these were in the oven, so we won’t wait. I hope you haven’t been very much bored.’ Lawford dropped his hands from his face and smiled. ‘I have been looking at the water,’ he said. ‘My sister’s favorite occupation; she sits for hours and hours, with not even a book for an apology, staring down into the black old roaring pot. It has a sort of hypnotic effect after a time. And you’d be surprised how quickly one gets used to the noise. To me it’s even less distracting than sheer silence. You don’t know, after all, what on earth sheer silence means—even at Widderstone. But one can just realize a water-nymph. They chatter; but, thank Heaven, it’s not articulate.’ He handed Lawford a cup with a certain niceness and self-consciousness, lifting his eyebrows slightly as he turned. Lawford found himself listening out of a peculiar stillness of mind to the voice of this suave and rather inscrutable acquaintance. ‘The curious thing is, do you know,’ he began rather nervously, ‘that though I must have passed your gate at least twice in the last few months, I have never noticed it before, never even caught the sound of the water.’