I have always thought that houses have their atmosphere, like people, and this house lately has seemed bewitched.  After Mr. Goward left, although every one tried to pretend things were as they should be, the situation grew more and more uncomfortable.  I felt it, though no one told me a thing.  I fancy that most older people have the same experience often that I have had lately.  All at once you are aware something is wrong.  You can’t tell why you feel this; you only know that you are living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness.  You see no tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have been shed just the same.  Why?  You don’t know, and no one thinks of telling you.  It is like seeing life from so far off that you cannot make out what has happened.  I have sometimes leaned out of a window and have seen down the street a crowd of gesticulating people, but I was too far off to know whether some one was hurt or whether it was only people gathered around a man selling something.  When I see such things my heart beats, for I am always afraid it is an accident, and so with the things I don’t know in my own household.  I always fancy them worse than they are.  There are so many things one can imagine when one doesn’t know, and now I fancied everything.  Such things, I think, tell on older people more than on younger ones, and at last I went to my room and kept there most of the time, reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.  It is an excellent work in many ways.  I am told it is given in sanitariums for nervous people to read, for the purpose of getting their minds off themselves.  I found it useful to get my mind off others, for of late I have gotten to an almost morbid alertness, and I know by the very way Peggy ran up the stairs that something ailed her even before I caught a glimpse of her face, which showed me that she was going straight to her room to cry.

This sort of thing had happened too often, and I made up my mind I would not live in this moral fog another moment.  So I went to Ada.

“Ada,” I said, “I am your mother, and I think I have a right to ask you a question.  I want to know this:  what has that young man been doing?”

“I suppose you mean Harry,” Ada answered.  “He hasn’t been doing anything.  Peggy’s a little upset because he isn’t a good correspondent.  You know how girls feel—­”

“Don’t tell me, Ada,” said I.  “I know better.  There’s more in it than that.  Peggy’s a sensible girl.  There’s something wrong, and I want you to tell me what it is.”  Younger people don’t realize how bad it can be to be left to worry alone in the dark.

Ada sat down with a discouraged air such as I have seldom seen her with.  I went over to her and took her hand in mine.

“Tell mother what’s worrying you, dear,” I said, gently.

“Why, it’s all so absurd,” Ada answered.  “I can’t make head or tail of it.  Aunt Elizabeth came to me full of mystery soon after she came back, and told me that Harry Goward had become infatuated with her when she was off on one of her visits—­”