I merely stared at her and listened.  Questions, I felt sure, would be of little use.  It was better she should say her thought in her own way.

“He is one influence, the most recent,” she went on slowly, and always very calmly, “but there are others—­deeper layers, as it were—­ underneath.  If his were the only one, something would happen.  But nothing ever does happen.  The others hinder and prevent—­as though each were struggling to predominate.”

I had felt it already myself.  The idea was rather horrible.  I shivered.

“That’s what is so ugly about it—­that nothing ever happens,” she said.  “There is this endless anticipation—­always on the dry edge of a result that never materializes.  It is torture.  Mabel is at her wits’ end, you see.  And when she begged me—­what I felt about my sketches—­I mean—­”

She stammered badly as before.

I stopped her.  I had judged too hastily.  That queer symbolism in her paintings, pagan and yet not innocent, was, I understood, the result of mixture.  I did not pretend to understand, but at least I could be patient.  I consequently held my peace.  We did talk on a little longer, but it was more general talk that avoided successfully our hostess, the paintings, wild theories, and him—­until at length the emotion Frances had hitherto so successfully kept under burst vehemently forth again.

It had hidden between her calm sentences, as it had hidden between the lines of her letter.  It swept her now from head to foot, packed tight in the thing she then said.

“Then, Bill, if it is not an ordinary haunted house,” she asked, “what is it?”

The words were commonplace enough.  The emotion was in the tone of her voice that trembled; in the gesture she made, leaning forward and clasping both hands upon her knees, and in the slight blanching of her cheeks as her brave eyes asked the question and searched my own with anxiety that bordered upon panic.  In that moment she put herself under my protection.  I winced.

“And why,” she added, lowering her voice to a still and furtive whisper, “does nothing ever happen?  If only,”—­this with great emphasis—­ “something would happen—­break this awful tension—­bring relief.  It’s the waiting I cannot stand.”  And she shivered all over as she said it, a touch of wildness in her eyes.

I would have given much to have made a true and satisfactory answer.  My mind searched frantically for a moment, but in vain.  There lay no sufficient answer in me.  I felt what she felt, though with differences.  No conclusive explanation lay within reach.  Nothing happened.  Eager as I was to shoot the entire business into the rubbish heap where ignorance and superstition discharge their poisonous weeds, I could not honestly accomplish this.  To treat Frances as a child, and merely “explain away” would be to strain her confidence in my protection, so affectionately claimed.  It would further be dishonest to myself—­weak, besides—­to deny that I had also felt the strain and tension even as she did.  While my mind continued searching, I returned her stare in silence; and Frances then, with more honesty and insight than my own, gave suddenly the answer herself—­an answer whose truth and adequacy, so far as they went, I could not readily gainsay: