“If only—­” Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping out instinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind: 

“—­something would happen.”

She instantly corrected me.  I had caught her thought, yet somehow phrased it wrongly.

“We could escape!” She lowered her tone a little, saying it hurriedly.  The “we” amazed and horrified me; but something in her voice and manner struck me utterly dumb.  There was ice and terror in it.  It was a dying woman speaking—­a lost and hopeless soul.

In that atrocious moment I hardly noticed what was said exactly, but I remember that my sister returned with a grey shawl about her shoulders, and that Mabel said, in her ordinary voice again, “It is chilly, yes; let’s have tea inside,” and that two maids, one of them the grenadier, speedily carried the loaded trays into the morning-room and put a match to the logs in the great open fireplace.  It was, after all, foolish to risk the sharp evening air, for dusk was falling steadily, and even the sunshine of the day just fading could not turn autumn into summer.  I was the last to come in.  Just as I left the verandah a large black bird swooped down in front of me past the pillars; it dropped from overhead, swerved abruptly to one side as it caught sight of me, and flapped heavily towards the shrubberies on the left of the terraces, where it disappeared into the gloom.  It flew very low, very close.  And it startled me, I think because in some way it seemed like my Shadow materialized—­as though the dark horror that was rising everywhere from house and garden, then settling back so thickly yet so imperceptibly upon us all, were incarnated in that whirring creature that passed between the daylight and the coming night.

I stood a moment, wondering if it would appear again, before I followed the others indoors, and as I was in the act of closing the windows after me, I caught a glimpse of a figure on the lawn.  It was some distance away, on the other side of the shrubberies, in fact where the bird had vanished.  But in spite of the twilight that half magnified, half obscured it, the identity was unmistakable.  I knew the housekeeper’s stiff walk too well to be deceived.  “Mrs. Marsh taking the air,” I said to myself.  I felt the necessity of saying it, and I wondered why she was doing so at this particular hour.  If I had other thoughts they were so vague, and so quickly and utterly suppressed, that I cannot recall them sufficiently to relate them here.

And, once indoors, it was to be expected that there would come explanation, discussion, conversation, at any rate, regarding the singular noise and its cause, some uttered evidence of the mood that had been strong enough to drive us all inside.  Yet there was none.  Each of us purposely, and with various skill, ignored it.  We talked little, and when we did it was of anything in the world but that.  Personally, I experienced a touch of that same bewilderment