"Wish I could! I must get the mare back, and I want to be there when Herrick gets in." I untied the mare and backed her around. Mary was standing on the porch. "Do you notice you can smell that stagnant water at the dam? We seem to get it in whiffs, every once in a while. I noticed it very strongly last night, sitting out here. I wonder the Sliefers can stand it, living as close as they do." There was a slight taint on the air. As Mary said, it seemed to come in whiffs. It might have been the dam, but it carried my mind back, as a smell will do, to some vague recollection I could not quite place. "There's a lot of rotting vegetation there. Maybe it isn't so bad at their end. Sometimes you smell things much more at a distance." "It just comes and goes. I don't notice it now. You'll be over this evening?" "I'll bring Herrick along if he's back." I paused, held by a vague trouble in her eyes. "You aren't worried, Mary?" "Worried? No. I just feel ... restless. It's the sort of feeling you get before a storm. As if we were all waiting for something, and you don't know what." "You've been upset about this Menning affair." "It isn't that. I don't know what it is. The place, maybe ... I always liked woods before, and now I feel as if I should never like them again." Her grave clear eyes held mine. "Austin, I wish I knew. If only ... sometimes I almost wish we'd never come to this place at all." "Mary, you don't really wish that?" "No, I don't. I ought to, but I can't. But ... I do wish we were all away--out of here--somewhere else." "We shall be, soon enough." I was thinking of the end of my holiday, the breaking-up of a summer that, if it had brought danger and ugliness and all but tragedy, had brought also something infinitely precious into my life--something I was far from ready to lose. "The summer has done Kate good, anyway. We had a letter from her this morning." "Where is she?" I knew that Mrs. Lessing had left a few days before, to stay with some friends. "On Long Island. A place on the Sound. We'll probably join her there in a couple of weeks. I wish you could come--you and Jack both. I think the sea air would blow sense into all of us!" She laughed. "I'm talking like an old woman, and I've got Dick's supper to get and nothing ready! Well, we'll see you tonight." "Would you rather I stayed?" "Nonsense! You'll begin to think I'm developing nerves, next!" She waved her hand as I climbed into the buggy. Gathering up the reins, I turned the mare's head homeward. It was already nearly dark, but I could still see the road before me. Was it presage, or only the desire for Mary's company that made me wish, even before I had turned the corner by Dutchman's Hill, that I had after all accepted Lessing's invitation and stayed on? As I reached the point where the road dipped to the hollow it seemed to me that I could smell once more that queer unplaceable odour of which Mary had spoken. XX