mechanism--no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches--I thought her, still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not seen Lithway withering under her very eyes. It was a dreary day during which we waited for the New York physician; one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist--a monotonous and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact that they were his got on my nerves. I decided to go to my room and throw myself on the resources of my own luggage. There would be something there to read, I knew. I closed the library door quietly and went up-stairs. Outside my own door I stopped and looked--involuntarily, with no conscious curiosity--up to the third-story hall. There, in the dim corridor, leaning over the balustrade in a thin shaft of sunlight that struck up from the big window on the landing, stood Mrs. Lithway, with a folded paper in her hand, looking down at me. I did not wish to raise my voice--Lithway, I thought, might be sleeping--so did not speak to her. I don’t think, in any case, I should have wanted to speak to her. The look in her eyes was distinctly unpleasant--the kind of look people don’t usually face you with. I remember wondering, as our surprised glances met, why the deuce she should hate me like that--how the deuce a nice young thing could hate any one like that. It must be personal to me, I thought--no nice young thing would envisage the world at large with such venom. I turned away; and as I turned, I saw her, out of the tail of my eye, walk, with her peculiar lightness of step, along the upper corridor to the trunk-loft. She had the air of being caught, of not having wished to be seen. I opened my bedroom door immediately, but as I opened it I heard a sound behind me. Margaret Lithway stood on the threshold of her husband’s room, with an empty bottle. “Would you mind taking the car into the village and getting this filled again?” she asked. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them; she had evidently not slept, the night before.