“I don’t think you understand,” she said with her austere and troubled eyes on his face. “Understand what?” he demanded. “Us!” was all she said. And it was all she had a chance to say, for the next moment the distant and indignant voice was commanding her to come to the house, and to come at once. She went without hesitation, like a bidden child. Conkling saw the deep gloom of one of the French windows swallow up the lilac sunbonnet and the organdie gown. Then he folded his easel and his camp stool, stared for a minute or two at the decrepid peacock and the overturned sarcophagus, and told himself that without a shadow of doubt he would come back. CHAPTER TWO Conkling went back. It was, indeed, rather a habit with him, this going back to authenticate the questionable, this returning to appraise the survivals of undecipherable civilizations. But before going back the technique of his calling as a collector, of his activities as an antiquarian, prompted him to assemble what data he could concerning the occupants of the old Kent County manor-house on the Lake Road. He did not discover a great deal, and much of this, in the end, proved contradictory. But once he had tapped the rock of rural reticence he found a copious enough flow of the waters of hostility. The countryside apparently had very little that was good to say of the Keswicks. They were “queer” and felt themselves above their neighbors. They had even shot off an old blunderbuss at certain youths of Weston who had raided the row of oxheart cherries in their orchard, and had allowed a horse to die of distemper without calling in a veterinary surgeon. As for the girl, Julia Keswick, she wasn’t so bad as the two old she-dragons, but she was reputed to be a spitfire and hard to hold down. This, however, Conkling found neutralized by later information to the effect that the girl was as shy as a rabbit, and no one ever knew what she was up to. But she gave herself airs, chiefly, apparently, because she had been at a convent school in Quebec. “And there was them as called her a beauty, and them as preferred a woman with more meat’n a sparrow on her bones!”