“And how are you?” I asked, giving her a belated kiss.  “It’s jolly to be together again.  I did feel rather lost without you, I’ll admit.”

“That’s natural,” she laughed.  “I’m so glad.”

She looked well and had country color in her cheeks.  She informed me that she was eating and sleeping well, going out for little walks with Mabel, painting bits of scenery again, and enjoying a complete change and rest; and yet, for all her brave description, the word somehow did not quite ring true.  Those last words in particular did not ring true.  There lay in her manner, just out of sight, I felt, this suggestion of the exact reverse—­of unrest, shrinking, almost of anxiety.  Certain small strings in her seemed over-tight.  “Keyed-up” was the slang expression that crossed my mind.  I looked rather searchingly into her face as she was telling me this.

“Only—­the evenings,” she added, noticing my query, yet rather avoiding my eyes, “the evenings are—­well, rather heavy sometimes, and I find it difficult to keep awake.”

“The strong air after London makes you drowsy,” I suggested, “and you like to get early to bed.”

Frances turned and looked at me for a moment steadily.  “On the contrary, Bill, I dislike going to bed—­here.  And Mabel goes so early.”  She said it lightly enough, fingering the disorder upon my dressing table in such a stupid way that I saw her mind was working in another direction altogether.  She looked up suddenly with a kind of nervousness from the brush and scissors.

“Billy,” she said abruptly, lowering her voice, “isn’t it odd, but I hate sleeping alone here?  I can’t make it out quite; I’ve never felt such a thing before in my life.  Do you—­think it’s all nonsense?”

And she laughed, with her lips but not with her eyes; there was a note of defiance in her I failed to understand.

“Nothing a nature like yours feels strongly is nonsense, Frances,” I replied soothingly.

But I, too, answered with my lips only, for another part of my mind was working elsewhere, and among uncomfortable things.  A touch of bewilderment passed over me.  I was not certain how best to continue.  If I laughed she would tell me no more, yet if I took her too seriously the strings would tighten further.  Instinctively, then, this flashed rapidly across me:  that something of what she felt, I had also felt, though interpreting it differently.  Vague it was, as the coming of rain or storm that announce themselves hours in advance with their hint of faint, unsettling excitement in the air.  I had been but a short hour in the house—­big, comfortable, luxurious house—­but had experienced this sense of being unsettled, unfixed, fluctuating—­a kind of impermanence that transient lodgers in hotels must feel, but that a guest in a friend’s home ought not to feel, be the visit short or long.  To Frances, an impressionable woman, the feeling had come in the terms of alarm.  She disliked sleeping alone, while yet she longed to sleep.  The precise idea in my mind evaded capture, merely brushing through me, three-quarters out of sight; I realized only that we both felt the same thing, and that neither of us could get at it clearly.