She began with lesser changes. "You know, dear, I think we should get rid of that old clock."

They had been married six weeks and still occupied the bird's-eye-maple room. Richard had hinted more than once that it was time they moved downstairs and let Thorne have the smaller chamber, Judith had dealt with this problem by having Jesse Moffat install a heating stove in the room, making it so cozy that Richard had been wooed to its warmth and luxury and finally agreed that the downstairs room be kept for a guest chamber.

He lay now in bed, drowsily comfortable, watching the movement of Judith's bare arms as she brushed her hair for the night. She kept the room at a temperature that made a wrapper unnecessary. Bedtime, she had discovered, was the ideal time for securing his endorsement of controversial issues.

"Did you hear what I said, Richard?" She was watching him in the mirror.

He murmured, "Um ummmmm," his eyes on her breasts as they rose and fell with each upward movement of the arm holding the brush.

"Well--what do you think?"

"I think"—he smiled—"that's it's fun being married to a hussy."

"Richard!" She laid down the brush and reached for a night robe. "I was talking about the clock downstairs."

"What about it?"

"It doesn't run."

"Naturally." He yawned. "It has no mainspring."

"And a new one can't be got, I understand."

"I'm afraid not. It's a very old clock—made in Switzerland. I don't believe parts for it can be bought in this country."

"Then let's get rid of it."

He opened his eyes wide, as though he had been asked to shoot one of the family.

"Get rid of Grandfather Tomlinson's clock? Why, it's over forty years old. Father brought it all the way out here from Virginia."

"But it doesn't keep time. A timepiece that doesn't run and can't be fixed is as useless as a chronic invalid who won't die."

The words had scarcely left her lips before she wondered, in consternation, what had induced her to make such a remark.

He carefully avoided her eyes in the mirror, but he answered casually enough:

"We'll see if it's possible to get a new spring. Mother said the clock had a beautiful tone. I'm sure she'd be glad to hear it striking again."

Judith did not want the clock repaired; she wanted it removed. It was the gloomiest piece of furniture she had ever seen. But when the jeweler in Woodridge reported that only a Swiss clock mender could repair the clock, the family voted unanimously that the defunct timepiece should remain where it was. That was when she learned about the corporate unity of the Tomlinsons.

She was more successful with her mother-in-law.

"Miss Ann, dear, do you mind if we serve the soup first? And then remove the plates before bringing in the meat and vegetables? Let's not put the pie on the table until we have finished with the rest of the meal. It's really no more trouble and it makes more room than putting everything on at once."

Ann Tomlinson had not made up her mind what she thought of this new daughter-in-law and her advanced ideas. She did not consider that it mattered what she thought. She had advanced ideas herself regarding the limitations of parenthood. Richard was no longer the inexperienced lad for whom a bride had been selected willy-nilly. He was a mature man who had made his own choice. He must be allowed to manage this second marriage his own Way. She had held her tongue and refrained from saying one word against it when there was still time. Now that the time was past, her only interest was in co-operation. She had discerned that small things were important to Judith. A pleased wife made a happy husband. Richard's mother could help, at least that much,

"It takes more time, Judith, to serve the meal the way you suggest. The men are always in a hurty at noon. How would you like to try it out at the evening meal?"

Judith was elated with her easy victory until she thought it over later, and then she was not sure whether she or her mother-in-law had scored.

But the more formal service of the evening meal was installed, with Millie grumbling audibly at the extra steps entailed until it was discovered that the table was cleared—or nearly so—by the time the meal was over and the business of dishwashing really expedited. The Tomlinson daughters, on their first visit, were charmed with the arrangement, and Kate announced that she was going to try it in the Turner household. The Tomlinson males—with the exception of Richard--were bored with the whole procedure. Richard declared that he liked it.

It was that way in everything. During the first weeks of their marriage he approved every suggestion Judith made. Many were so impracticable as to impede seriously the work of the busy farm household, but Richard merely advised getting more help if it were needed. Sometimes his brother Will looked at him in exasperation and once scornfully asked if he were losing his wits. Richard's infatuation seemed complete.

But Judith could have told her brother-in-law that actually her influence over her husband went no deeper than the play of sunlight on the face of a cliff. He agreed with her when it was a matter which concerned him little, such as the laying of a supper table. On a question which touched him personally he was impervious as granite.

This was brought home to her very soon after their marriage.

They attended a lecture in Woodridge one evening. It was their first appearance in public since their wedding, and after the speaking they held quite a little reception among their friends. The talk turned on the wedding and the joke that had been played on the overnight guests. Richard was asked if he had ever discovered the identity of the mischief-maker and he answered promptly that he had. His two cousins from Bridgeport had been the culprits.

On the way home in the phaeton Judith said to him, "You really shouldn't have told a falsehood, darling, about our wedding charivari."

"I told no falsehood."

"Of course, dear, I realize you were trying to protect Thorne."

She felt him stiffen at her side.

He said, "The Car boys played the prank, and when they saw how people's clothes were ruined they were ashamed to own up to it."

"Did they confess their guilt to you?"

"They did. I saw them in town the other day and frankly charged them with the mischief."

After a moment's silence Judith said, "I don't believe it was the Gary boys."

"You mean you think I'm lying?"

"No. I mean I don't believe it could have been an adult. Everyone agreed that only a child or small animal could have crawled to the tops of those trees. An animal is out of the question, so it must have been a child. Your boys are much too young. There was only one other child in the house."

He said, "A ladder and a fishing pole were used to bring the clothes down from the trees. The same implements could have been used to put them up there."

"And who," murmured Judith, "is more adept at using theatrical props than Thorne?"

He gave his attention to the horse, who had fallen into a jog.

"Have you ever questioned Thorne about this?" asked Judith.

"No." His voice was the voice of a stranger.

"Then how do you know whether it was her work or not?"

"Because I'm satisfied it was the work of the Car boys."

But still Judith seemed unable to let the matter drop.

"You must remember, Richard, that Thorne went to bed that night very angry at me." This was the first time Judith had alluded to the incident, and she now proceeded to eat humble pie in cathartic doses. She pleaded nerves, headache, all the timeworn feminine alibis for bad temper, concluding meekly, "I take the whole blame. Thorne was perfectly justified in feeling a desire to get even with me for sending her to bed."

"I agree with you," said Richard much too promptly. "But because she was justified, it does not follow that she was capable of harboring a feeling of petty revenge. That prank was horseplay of a very low order; a performance of which Thorne would have been incapable."

''But she's just a child, Richard, with a child's love of mischief. You're making the thing entirely too serious."

"It's you who are making the thing serious, Judith. Even when I tell you that Bob Gary admitted to me that he and his brother planned it in advance, you seem inclined to doubt my word."

Judith said suddenly, "Will you let me do one thing, Richard? Will you let me tell Thorne what you have just told me —and watch her reaction?"

"I intend to tell the whole family. You may watch the reaction of anyone you choose."

He made the disclosure the next morning at breakfast. It was greeted with mingled amusement and indignation. Miss Ann said she had suspected the Bridgeport cousins from the first. Will said he had felt all along it was the work of more than one person. Jesse Moffat was relieved to learn it wasn't witches. Thorne was frankly overjoyed at this proof of her innocence.

"I was afraid people would think I had done it. It was so much like my magic tricks."

"You couldn't have done it, Cricket, with all your cleverness," said Richard. "Not unless you were twins."

Judith did not join in the laughter that greeted her husband's sally. She felt as though she had lost the first skirmish in a battle which had barely begun.

Yet she was very happy those first months of her marriage. He was all that she had anticipated. If he was a little more than she had bargained for, that was only an added stimulus. He was ardent, yet aloof. He delighted and at the same time provoked her. Sometimes she wondered if she ever would know what went on inside his mind. He was a passionate lover but strangely absent-minded. She could not recall that he had ever told her that he loved her.

But he was the man she had desired above all others, and the satisfaction of having him for a husband was worth all it had cost her. She had been obliged to perform a number of unpleasant chores in order to bring the present felicity to pass. She regretted nothing, but she did think it rather too bad that she had to be reminded of Abigail at every turn.

For instance, there was an album on the table in the front room filled with pictures of Abigail and Abigail's relatives. Judith saw no reason why that album couldn't be put away with the dead woman's other things, instead of being left out where she must look at it. She had a queer compulsion which moved her, every time she was near the album, to open it and look at Abigail's picture. It was most unpleasant.

She took the matter up with Richard in a roundabout way.

''There don't seem to be any Tomlinsons in the album."

He answered, "Not in that one. That's the Huse family album. Abigail had it before we were married."

"Don't you think, dear—I mean—really, it's not good taste to keep family pictures in the front room, is it?"

"I don't know." He glanced at the fireplace, above which hung portraits of his Tomlinson grandparents. "Most people around here keep family photographs—if they're fortunate enough to have any—where they can be seen."

"But these are photographs of strangers."

'They are my children's maternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins," said Richard quietly. "And the only likenesses we have of their mother."

"Oh, I didn't mean " Judith blushed at her own faux pas. "Of course the pictures will be priceless to Ricky and Rodgie when they're older. That's the reason they should be put somewhere for safekeeping."

"Where would you suggest?" he seemed amenable. "Maybe we'd better take them upstairs to our room."

Judith repressed a slight shudder. "I don't think they should be kept out at all. They should be preserved, like the treasured heirlooms they are. Didn't"—finding it impossible to speak Abigail's name, she was at a loss what to call her—"didn't the boys' mother have a chest in her room in which she kept her most cherished belongings?"

"Yes."

"Then why not put the album of photographs in there?" Judith looked up from her work to find him regarding her with a curious smile.

"All right," he said, "if it bothers you having them around."

She flushed. "It doesn't bother me. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I merely "

"I think it does," he interrupted, still smiling. "I think you find it unpleasant to open the album and see Abigail staring back at you. Of course you don't have to open it every time you pass the table "

"We'll say no more about it, Richard." She bent over her fancywork with flaming cheeks.

"Oh, come now. I was only teasing. It's nothing to be ashamed of, Judith. I believe second wives are supposed to feel that way about things belonging to the first. And I think I'm supposed to feel flattered."

She hated the whole conversation. She resented the mischievous twinkle which usually she adored. She loathed being reminded that she was a second wife.

"Please, Richard, don't say any more."

But he picked up the album and left the room. When he returned he tossed a small key into her lap.

"The album is now in the chest, along with her quilts and silver. The chest is locked, and there is the key."

"Keep it yourself," muttered Judith, and tossed it back to him. He caught it, laughing, took a bunch of keys from his pocket, and slipped it on the ring.

"Abigail was a great one to hoard silver," he went on. "Would you believe it, her purse was filled with quarters and dimes, besides four silver dollars and a fifty-cent piece."

"What did you do with them?" asked Judith idly.

"Oh, I put them back for the boys. They're quite a rarity these days. She must have had them before we were married, because this house hasn't seen any silver since before the war."

As he put his key ring back in his pocket he drew forth a roll of paper money: two-dollar bills, one-dollar bills, and small currency as low as ten cents in value. "Shinplasters," he chuckled. "How Abigail detested shinplasters. And brass and wooden tokens for nickels and pennies."

"Is it absolutely necessary that we discuss Abigail?" asked Judith sharply.

He glanced at her in mild astonishment. "Why, no, I wasn't aware that I was discussing her. I was talking about postwar currency." He returned the money to his pocket, but he continued to look curiously at his wife.

"You know, Judith, I believe you're afraid of Abigail."

Her face went so white that had he not been intent on his own thought he might have been alarmed.

"What do you mean—afraid?"

"I think you're afraid I have tender memories. Well, you needn't be. I never loved Abigail. She wouldn't let me."

Rehef made Judith suddenly bold. She asked the question she had never dared ask before.

"Do you love me, Richard?"

His answer was appallingly frank. "I don't know."

She wished sickeningly that she had remained in ignorance.

''Don't know!" she spoke lightly. "Surely you know how you feel."

"I feel slightly drunk most of the time." He smiled. "And so far I've no desire to sober up."

He put his hands on the arms of her chair, and she raised her face to his. His mouth on hers was a lover's mouth. And with that she had to be content.

She watched him that night with the children. The fireside reading, which had been such a delightful feature of the previous winter, had been replaced by home tutoring in schoolwork. Judith herself, to her own chagrin, had brought this change to pass.

"I don't think, dear, that Thorne should be permitted to sit with us in the evenings until she has prepared her lessons for next day." It was during one of their bedtime chats, following an evening when Thorne had embarrassed the reading circle by asking for a definition of the word "platonic." "She should be studying her schoolbooks," said Judith, "instead of listening to you read aloud."

"I didn't know she had to study at home." Richard looked concerned. Judith pursued her advantage—a little too far.

"Arithmetic is difficult for her. I know; I taught her last year. I had to stretch a point to give her a passing grade. If she doesn't study at home this winter she'll never get through partial payments. You wouldn't like to see her fail, would you?"

Richard was alarmed. He questioned Thorne, who frankly admitted that partial payments were too much for her. Mr. Carpenter gave such long assignments that only the smartest boys in class could cope with them. She had given up trying to keep abreast of the others.

Richard promptly announced that the evening reading would be postponed until Thorne's problems were disposed of.

''That's unfair to the other children," Judith pointed out. "Ricky and Rodgie have to go to bed early. Let Thorne take her work into the dining room. There's a fire in there. She can study as late as need be and no one will disturb her."

But Richard had a better plan. "I'll help her with the problems. Then we'll get through in time for all of us to enjoy the reading together."

They worked every evening after that, Richard and Thorne at the dining-room table. The little boys, not to be left out of anything, brought primers and slates and joined the class in home instruction. And because Richard had that rare quality of inciting general interest in whatever he was doing, the lessons in the dining room soon became the focus of family attention. They usually ended in a hilarious romp about the time Jesse Moffat appeared with the bedtime basket of apples.

On the evening in question Thorne had been particularly cloudy on the subject of decimals. Stupid, Judith would have called her. But Richard's patience seemed inexhaustible. Over and over he explained, but every time the troublesome point came up in the wrong place. Thorne's face grew pale with weariness and strain and finally she burst into tears.

"Oh, Richard, I just can't learn arithmetic. You're wasting your time. Let me stay home from school and help Millie."

If there was one thing calculated to arouse him, it was the mere suggestion of Thorne occupying the position of a servant.

"Cricket! How can you say such a thing? You don't want to quit school like that silly Nancy Turner. What's come over you tonight?"

She could have told him that Judith's critical presence in the room was no stabilizer. But she answered nothing;

only sat silent, while her tears sponged the errors from her slate.

Richard put his arm around her comfortingly. "You're tired, dear. You should be in bed. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll let the lessons go tonight, and tomorrow morning you and I will get up an hour early and tackle them while we're fresh. How's that?"

"Oh, for goodness sake, Richard, stop babying her." Judith's annoyance burst from her at last. Thorne slipped quickly from under his arm and went upstairs.

In the morning she arose before daylight and went doggedly at her books again, but Richard did not join her. Judith saw to it that he overslept.

He was full of apologies at breakfast. Thorne did not reproach him. She had surprisingly got through the bothersome problem by her own effort. And as she walked to school that morning with Ricky and Rodgie she took herself sternly to task. Where had she got the idea that she had a right to be happy all her life? She had had last summer, hadn't she? That was more than some people ever had.

"Who're you talking to, Thorne?" asked Ricky.

Rodgie said, "You're not mad at me, are you?"

She laughed at their startled young faces and offered to race them to the horse steps.

CHAPTER 16

Thorne was at last reconciled to the passing of summer. Not by anything that had happened, but by the simple change of season that told her it was gone. There had been frost on the ground for a month now, and one or

two light snows had fallen. The corn was gathered, the hogs were butchered, the potatoes were dug. In the kitchen houseflies dropped dead from the ceiling and ice crusted the basins in the early mornings. The children had put on their long underwear, and shoes and stockings once more appeared in Timberley schoolhouse. The spicy sweetness of baking pumpkin was in the air, and the big turkey that had strutted so arrogantly all fall was meekly roasting in Millie's huge oven.

Then without warning, the day before Thanksgiving, she wakened in a sweat under a pile of blankets and dashed to the window to find the sky a warm summer blue. Cows trotted friskily down the lane as though it were spring, bells tintinnabulating. The creak of a pump handle, the brisk clucking argument of hens, the neigh of a mule in the pasture were again the sounds of summer. For a moment time flowed backward. She was racing to get dressed and out to the woods to gather berries for Richard's breakfast. Nothing that was had ever been. She had dreamed the last three months.

Then recollection stabbed her. This was only Indian summer, that sly deceiver that came every year to taunt you with false promises of spring long after spring was dead.

But the poignant joy of her awakening was with her all day. Nothing seemed quite real. She moved in a dream as unsubstantial as the smoky haze that softened the bare bleakness of fields and woods so that the loss of their verdure was forgotten. But underneath this ecstasy of unreality was a strange sense of foreboding.

The entire Tomlinson clan gathered at Timberley for Thanksgiving. Because of the extra company, Thorne slept downstairs in the trundle bed. She did not rest very well because Cousin Lutie, in the alcove, snored all night. Throughout the wakeful hours Thorne heard strange noises all over the house. In the room adjoining, the sound of someone moving about was so disturbing that once she cried out.

''Who slept in the south bedroom?" she asked at breakfast. "I heard somebody moving around in there in the middle of the night."

The visiting Tomlinsons exchanged shocked glances with the members of the household. It seemed that no one had slept in the downstairs bedroom. There had, in fact, been a slight argument over the matter, with both Turners and Mitchells declining to occupy the room in which their sister-in-law had died.

''You must have been dreaming, child," said Miss Ann, and there the whole thing would have dropped had not Judith interposed. She felt that Thorne should be made to retract her false statement.

Richard immediately took exception to his wife's remark.

"Thorne is not well. She's a bundle of nerves, and no wonder. She has no regular place to sleep. Whenever there's company and somebody has to be inconvenienced, it's Thorne who's made to sleep downstairs in a bed that's too short for her."

This was a direct thrust at Judith for her refusal to vacate the bird's-eye-maple room. No more was said. Richard opened the Bible for morning prayers.

He began reading at the fifteenth chapter of Luke, the eighth verse:

" 'Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?' "

Something dropped from the big limp book in Richard's hands and rolled briskly across the table. Everyone heard the metallic clink as it struck the butter dish and caught the gleam of silver. Every eye saw it lying bright and shining on the tablecloth. It was a fifty-cent piece.

For a breathless moment there was not a sound. Then there came a surprised gasp from little Rodgie: "Oh! that's one of Mami's silver pieces that she kept in her purse."

Millie, always present at morning prayers, groaned, "Oh Lawdy! That's what she was lookin' for last night," and rolled her eyes fearfully.

There was general commotion then. Children cried and adults talked excitedly. Even Richard changed color, and his wife was seized with a fit of choking—or was it laughter? It was some time before order was restored to the breakfast table.

Richard put the money in his pocket and told the children to finish their meal.

"This money didn't come from your mother's purse," he explained to his sons. "The chest is locked and I have the key in my pocket." And that was the end of the incident for the time being. .

But the following day Miss Ann decided to take advantage of the warm spell and ordered the chicken house cleaned. The oldest Schook boy was hired to help Jesse Moffat. It being Saturday, the children all trooped out to watch them work. The Turner boys, who were finishing the holiday week at Grandmother's, organized a game of Indian, with the log hen house for a fort. It was while scaling this bastion that Jimmie Turner made a discovery.

"Look what I found!" he cried. A pile of photographs had been tossed on top of the hen house. They were pictures of Ricky's and Rodgie's dead mother.

While they were exclaiming over their find, Peter Schook, within the house, called to Jesse Moffat. "Look here, will you? See what I found under these nests."

The children ran into the chicken house to join the two hired hands in as weird a treasure hunt as could be imagined. Photographs were found in all sorts of places: hidden under piles of straw, flung far back of the roosts, as though someone had been hastily bent on putting them out of sight. Tintypes, daguerreotypes, and some of a later school of photography mounted on cardboard, all were likenesses of Abigail and Abigail's relatives. All had reposed, until a few weeks ago, in the album on the front-room table.

"Ooooh! Wait till Father finds who did this!" said Ricky. Someone was going to catch it. Youthful faces paled with pleasurable excitement.

All but Thorne's. Thorne, who had been sitting on the fence with Nancy Turner, watching the game of Indian, had a premonition that she was going to be charged with this mischief.

As the dinner bell was ringing by this time, Jesse Moffat and the Schook boy dropped their work and went up to the house, the children at their heels like excited terriers.

"Look what we found in the hen house," said Jesse, and laid the photographs in front of Richard.

"Who did this?" he demanded sternly.

"We don't know," the children chorused loudly.

Judith came into the room at this moment. "What is it?" she asked.

"Here are the pictures I put away in the chest," said Richard. "Jesse found them out in the hen house."

Judith regarded the photographs without comment.

"Are you sure you locked the chest?" asked Miss Ann.

They went immediately to the south room and examined the chest. It was locked. On being opened, its contents appeared to be intact. But the album was empty. And the half dollar was missing from the purse.

Ann Tomlinson said, "Someone stole your key, Richard, and put it back later."

"How could they? The ring is never out of my pocket."

Judith said, very innocently, "Spiriting a key from your pocket, darling, would require a sleight-of-hand performance."

Richard's face flushed ominously. "Whom are you accusing, Judith?"

"No one, dear. I was merely making a joke."

Thorne sat down on a stool in the corner. They were back in the dining room now. It seemed to her that she had lived all this before! She had only to close her eyes and see, not Judith's firm ripe contours, but an emaciated figure in a challis wrapper screaming, "Now do you believe she's a witch!"

Judith was not screaming. She was smiling sweetly, but she had caused every eye to turn suspiciously on Thorne.

"Why not put a direct question to everyone?" she suggested to her husband.

Ann Tomlinson promptly added, "Now is the time to do it, son, while we're all gathered for dinner."

Richard, thus coerced, deliberately began with his own children.

"Ricky, what do you know about this?"

"Nothing, Father, except finding the pictures."

"Rodgie, have you been playing games with these photographs?"

"No, sir."

To Nancy, Jimmie, and Frank Turner, he put the same question and received the same answer. Even his brother Will was not passed by.

"Do you know anything about this. Will?"

Will said, "I didn't even know the pictures had been put in the chest," and gave his brother a sly grin, as though he guessed the reason for their removal.

"Jesse, you're usually the cutup around here. Is this your idea of a joke?"

On and on went the questioning. It sounded a little absurd now to everyone. It sounded absurd to Thorne, sitting wretchedly alone on her hassock, because of course no one believed these people guilty.

But Richard doggedly pursued his inquiry. "Peter, how about you?"

"As God is my judge, Mr. Richard, I never saw them pictures before."

''Mother, do you think Millie could have had anything to do with this?"

The idea was ludicrous, but Miss Ann went out to the kitchen to question her old servant.

''Judith"—Richard turned to his wife, and their glances met combatively—"you said every member of the household should be examined. Have you any light to throw upon this business?"

Judith said, still sweetly, "Nothing, except to remind you that you've overlooked Thorne."

"I haven't come to her yet."

"You've come to her now."

He looked across the room, where Thorne sat motionless on the stool. Her face was pale, but no paler than his.

"Cricket, do you know anything about this?"

"I didn't do it," said Thorne.

"Then that's all that matters," said Richard.

But Judith was not satisfied.

"You know, Thorne, you're quite clever enough to remove a key from a man's pocket without him being aware of your action."

Thorne said in a curious tone, "Yes, I know that. Other people know it too."

Judith said sharply, "what do you mean by that statement?"

Richard interrupted, "She's said she didn't do it, Judith. Why can't her word be accepted as well as the others?"

"Because she is insinuating something."

"You're not insinuating anything, are you. Cricket?"

Thorne's face was so pale now that she looked almost ill. It was very hard trying to explain with all of them staring at her. She said, "I've had a feeling something like this was going to happen."

"Make her tell what she means, Richard, by those veiled hints."

How could Thorne put into words what was so clear to her own sensitive perception? That sense of foreboding which had underlain her strange ecstasy had meaning now. This was what had been moving toward her, this incriminating circumstance. Judith would convince Richard of Thorne's guilt. And to lose Richard's trust and friendship would be a blow which should satisfy Thorne's bitterest enemy.

She said, "I've been too happy lately. I was afraid something would happen."

"That's superstition," said Judith.

"Yes, I know." Thorne wrinkled her smooth young brow with the effort to make her meaning clear. "I think whoever played this trick was hoping it would be laid at my door."

Judith's face flushed with anger. "Be careful how you make accusations, young lady."

"I'm not accusing anyone," said Thorne. She looked about the little group, noting the suspicion in the farm hands' faces, even in the wide clear eyes of the children. "But you can see how well it succeeded. You all believe I did this."

"We believe nothing of the sort," said Richard.

No one else spoke.

Miss Ann came back from the kitchen to report that Millie was ready to swear to her own innocence. Richard informed his mother of Thorne's belief that someone was trying to incriminate her.

"And I for one think it's the explanation for this mischief," he said, "and the stolen coin as well."

Miss Ann asked Thorne, "Who do you think has this spite against you, child?"

Thorne shook her head. It was not clear whether she refused to answer or did not know. But Judith suddenly decided to terminate the discussion.

"We're not interested in theories, we're interested in facts. Thorne, by her own admission, is the only person who could have stolen your key, Richard."

"And Thorne, by her own admission, did not steal my key, Judith. So that's the final word upon the subject."

But it was not the final word. There was one thing more, which Judith seemed impelled to say.

She waited until bedtime, when Richard was comfortably ensconced with his book, a candle at his elbow. It was not flattering that he had reverted so soon to his old habit of reading in bed. The ritual of hairbrushing no longer engrossed him.

"Of course it's quite plain what Thorne was hinting at this morning," Judith began.

He looked up from the page he was reading. "What did you say about Thorne?"

"Why, it was quite evident," said Judith, "Thorne would have had you believe I played that silly prank in order to incriminate her."

Richard looked not at all shocked, only interested.

"Yes, of course. You are the one person who has the perfect opportunity for taking my key and replacing it—while I'm asleep."

Judith dropped the brush she was wielding. She did not speak until she had retrieved it.

"My dear Richard, are you accusing me?"

He smiled innocuously. "You are quite as likely a suspect as Thorne. You had the opportunity and the motive."

"What motive?"

"Those pictures of Abigail were a source of irritation to you. You might have decided that you would feel happier if they were out of the house altogether. So you stole down in the dead of night; and Thorne, sleeping in the trundle bed, heard you and cried out and gave you a frightful scare. I don't believe you meant to incriminate Thorne—at first

Your thought was to punish her for the shock she had given you. Abigail's purse was at hand. You filched a coin from it and slipped it into the family Bible, where you knew I would find it. Later your own fear of discovery prompted an accusation of Thorne, which I believe—or hope—you're ashamed of." His voice was pleasant throughout.

Judith turned back to the mirror. The hand that held the brush was trembling.

"Of course you don't believe a word you're saying."

"Whether I do or not, my dear, we'll say no more about it. Thorne knows that I'm convinced of her innocence. It's not necessary for her to know any more."

"I suppose she put that idea about me into your head."

"Oh no," said Richard quickly. "I'm sure Thorne never thought of you. Poor child, she was afraid of Abigail."

"Abigail!" said Judith sharply. And then she laughed, "Do you mean the silly thing is afraid of a dead woman?"

"When you consider how she was persecuted by Abigail, it's small wonder she should imagine the woman's spirit was hounding her, playing pranks from beyond the grave to incriminate her."

Judith said, "Her purpose in advancing that theory is to frighten me."

"Now you're being ridiculous." Richard slumped back on his pillow. "Why should Thorne try to frighten you?"

"You may not have noticed, Richard, but Thorne has never liked me. As far back as a year ago, when she shared this room with me, I was conscious of her reluctance to sleep with me."

"That's interesting," said Richard, and picked up his book. "Because Thorne had the same idea about you. She felt that you didn't like sleeping with her."

"There!" said Judith triumphantly. "You see how she lies?"

He slammed down the book with a force which, unfortunately, did not register on the soft feather bed.

"Thorne does not lie. She has too much sense."

"She has no sense at all, as you ought to know; you've been coaching her in arithmetic. She's only precocious—emotionally."

It was out at last, the word that held significance. With its utterance two spots of color burned in Judith's cheeks.

Richard said, curiously, "What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm beginning to understand why Abigail didn't like her. Abigail wasn't as crazy as people thought. In some ways she was smart." Suddenly Judith realized she was talking to the man who had been Abigail's husband.

She went on more lightly, "I suppose it's growing pains with Thorne. She'll stop behaving like a spoiled child eventually and turn into a respectable member of adult society— at least we hope so. In the meantime, it's rather uncomfortable for the people who have to live with her."

Richard laid his book on the night table and blew out his candle. When Judith came to bed there was no response from the other occupant of the big four-poster. She wondered if he really suspected her guilt in the matter of the photographs. Doubtless his startling accusation had been a random shot, more or less facetious. If he knew how accurate had been his aim he would probably never speak to her again. She had skated on very thin ice for a moment.

How stupid she had been! How childishly stupid, to risk her happiness on such a paltry issue. Abigail herself could have behaved no more senselessly. She seemed to have been driven, as on her wedding night, to act as Abigail would have acted; to do the thing which, if discovered, would utterly alienate her husband, as if she were bent on wrecking her marriage.

Heaven helping her, she would never be such a fool again. She would overcome the silly feeling she had about Thorne, this stranger feeling she had about Abigail. She would do nothing henceforth to jeopardize her marriage.

CHAPTER 17

The new year was well into February before Judith achieved her purpose of giving a party at Timberley which should be something other than a family reunion. Twice she had postponed her date; first during the holiday season, when an annoying irritation of her throat had prompted Dr. Caxton to prescribe a few days in bed.

"But I'm not sick, Doctor. I feel quite well except for this choking sensation. It catches me suddenly without the slightest warning."

"A nervous paroxysm," pronounced the doctor. "You probably talk too much." From his quizzical expression a facetious dig was indicated. "Public speakers frequently suffer that way."

"But I'm not a pubhc speaker."

He blandly included schoolteachers in this occupational liability.

"I'm not teaching any more. I only use my voice in conversation."

"Try letting it rest for a day or so," was the crusty advice. "Go to bed—give your entire body a rest. Don't talk except when necessary. And keep yourself isolated from the children until we see what this is."

"You think it might be something contagious?"

"There's diphtheria over by Mullen's Mill," he told her bluntly. "I knew there'd be an epidemic of some sort. Some hogs died of cholera there last fall and were allowed to rot unburied during that warm spell. Someday we'll have laws about things like that, but I shan't live long enough to see it."

Judith went to bed for a week and had a wonderful time: reading, resting, and devising little services for Richard to perform. He was so sweet-tempered about waiting on her that she toyed with the temptation of prolonging her convalescence in order to enjoy his attentions. But on the doctor's next visit she was told to get out of bed and put on her clothes.

"We don't want any more invalids around here for Richard to coddle. There's nothing the matter with you."

Relieved, if somewhat indignant, Judith plunged into preparations for her party, which she now set forward to January, only to find a religious revival usurping the calendar for that month. Nothing daunted, she set her date for the first week in February and laid her plans before Richard, as a subtle means of persuading him that they were his own ideas.

Unfortunately he was inclined to be difficult. He had agreed heartily enough that they should give a party, but he failed to grasp its significance. It was not a family affair, she delicately pointed out. Neither the Turners nor the Mitchells were to be included. It was a little gathering of congenial spirits, and the only entertainment, besides a light refreshment, was to be the free flow of intellectual conversation. Richard seemed more interested in the fact that the party gave him an excuse to buy Thorne a new dress.

With remarkable patience and self-restraint Judith explained that Thorne would not need a new dress because she was not going to appear.

They argued this point exhaustively.

"This is an adult party. None of the children will be in evidence."

"That's all right for Ricky and Rodgie, but you said yourself that Thorne was growing up."

"I said she was suffering from growing pains. There's a difference."

Richard growled, "She's read a damn sight more than young Will."

By Judith's express invitation Will Tomlinson was to be among those present.

Miss Ann put an end to the argument by agreeing with Judith that Thorne was too young for a party of this sort. She would take all the children up to her room on the evening in question. Richard yielded, on one condition: that Thorne should be given a birthday party in May.

"Is her birthday in May?" inquired Judith.

He didn't know if it was or not, but May was a beautiful month for a party. His mother acquiesced, and Judith said it was a charming idea. They would give a party for all the children in May.

After that things went more smoothly. Invitations were so choice and few that they were accepted enthusiastically. An author of national repute chanced to be visiting old friends in Woodridge, and Judith captured him as the lion of the hour. In addition, there was the editor of the Sentinel, an oldish bachelor with a university degree and a spinster sister; there were the Barclays (Ellen included on her husband's account), Lucius Goff and a lady friend from Terre Haute, Albert Carpenter (present incumbent at Timberley school), and a few more of the intelligentsia.

Doc Baird was not invited, but Richard did not learn of this until it was too late to do anything about it.

The party was doomed from the outset. As an initial embarrassment everyone inquired for the absent Tomlinsons and seemed unable to grasp the idea that neither illness nor calamity was responsible for their non-appearance. Judith realized that she had committed an error in excluding the family.

But the major disaster was beyond her control. She had stated in her invitations that the gathering was complimentary to the visiting man of letters, Mr. Fairchild, and had indicated that literature was to be the subject of the evening's discussion. But unfortunately the six weeks' revival had just closed in a blaze of excitement, with the flaming oratory of the evangelist focused on the burning issue, "Is there a personal devil?" And those who had heard him were still smoking. Literature paled beside the incendiary topic of devils, both personal and general. Opinions ranged from the avowed skepticism of the Sentinel editor—who believed nothing he could not feel, taste, or smell—to the unshakable conviction of Mrs. Barclay, who declared the devil a part of her religion and accepted him complete with horns, hoofs, and tail. Discussion was livelier than anything Judith had dared hope for, but alas! on the wrong subject. Even Richard astonished her by affirming his belief in an incarnate spirit of evil.

"How else can you explain the brutality of war," he demanded, "or the lust for power, or selfisliness, greed, or murder? Either there's a devil in the world or there's one in every human breast."

Once before she had heard him talk like this. It was on the occasion of their first meeting, when he had argued so earnestly over the use of the supernatural in Macbeth.

From devils it was a simple and natural progression to ghosts. In vain did Judith bring forth a copy of Mr. Fairchild's latest book as a hint that literary talk was to have been the order of the evening. The author himself waved her aside as though the book had been written by someone else. He had, he confessed, a keen interest in things metaphysical. Lucius Goff, emboldened by sympathy, promptly declared his belief in spirit communication. The editor jeered at him; Mrs. Barclay warned him that though the devil was orthodox, ghosts and spirit rappings were not. The argument grew so heated that even the elderberry wine which Richard brought in failed to cool it. In fact, the refreshment gave rise to fresh discussion, for Mr. Fairchild, as though reminded of something by the homemade beverage, asserted that since his sojourn in this community he had come into possession of some interesting data on the subject of poltergeists.

Mrs. Barclay demanded to know what polter—whatyoumay-call'ems might be.

The author explained that poltergeists were spirits of the dead returned to earth to wreak mischief. He had heard about a case in this very county, he said.

The Sentinel editor came down upon him with hallucinations, spectral illusions, and acute inebriation. But the writer stood his ground.

"I have it on the best authority. There was a wedding a short while back at which the wearing apparel of the guests disappeared and was later found scattered at impossible heights in the surrounding trees."

He went on describing in detail the Tomlinson charivari, obviously unaware that he was talking to the people involved.

"I understand that the bridegroom has given out that two distant cousins were playing a practical joke." The author smiled significantly. "Naturally he would prefer to believe that, since his first wife had been dead but six months."

The silence was acutely uncomfortable. But the speaker took it for rapt attention on the part of his listeners and went innocently on:

"Other queer things have happened in this house. Some photographs of the dead wife, which were locked in a strong chest within the house, were found in a shed some distance from the dwelling. Silver coins, also locked in the chest, were found between the pages of books."

Again his hearers suffered extreme embarrassment. The story of the photographs and the coin had reached Woodridge by way of Jesse Moffat, and a number of those present had assisted in its circulation.

The only person who seemed unembarrassed was Richard. "Who told you these stories, Mr. Fairchild?"

"I've heard them from any number of people."

"Did you learn the name of the family?"

"If I did it's slipped my mind. I've a wretched memory for names. But I've talked with creditable witnesses."

"And it's the general belief that these pranks are cases of supernatural phenomena?" Richard was smiling now.

"That's one theory. I prefer it to the other advanced by local gossips."

"What is that?"

"Some people have gone so far as to accuse a young girl in this household of witchcraft."

Richard's smile vanished. "I can assure you the wedding prank was a practical joke, to which the jokers have confessed. As for the displaced photographs and silver—I think your theory of the poltergeist is rather interesting."

John Barclay felt sorry for Judith. He guessed that the evening had not gone the way she had planned. She sat with her back to the light, resting her cheek on her hand, looking almost ill with fatigue and wretchedly pale. He sat down at the piano and launched into a medley of popular songs to dispel the embarrassment and gloom of the unfortunate discussion. He could not understand why Richard continued to pursue the unhappy theme with Mr. Fairchild. Every time the music diminuendoed their voices could be heard in animated debate.

Judith listened to John Barclay's music and wished he would play louder and drown the voices of the men. Her face was rigid with the effort of smiling. She was so stunned by the turn her party had taken that she was not even indignant. Tomorrow, after a night's sleep—if she was able to sleep—she would remember this talk and be able to weigh it; perhaps dismiss it. But just now she could feel nothing but fear. All this talk about ghosts was not as purposeless as it seemed. Richard was deliberately fostering it. He did not really believe that his dead wife's spirit was among them. Yet he was announcing to all present that he preferred that theory to even the slightest suspicion of Thorne. Could this be a subtle re-

minder to Judith that he knew of her guilt in the matter of the photographs; that she must either confess or admit the possibihty of Abigail's unquiet ghost?

When at last she looked at Richard she found his eyes fixed upon her with a curious expression which she could not fathom.

When the party broke up she went swiftly to her room as to a refuge. She was in bed when he came upstairs, the covers drawn over her eyes to shut out the light. It was he who undressed leisurely this night. He did not disturb her with talk, but he seemed in unusually good spirits, whistling softly as he moved about the room. When he had extinguished the light and climbed into bed, he unexpectedly gathered her into his arms. He was softly laughing.

"Richard!" She was thankful for the darkness as she clung to him.

She wanted to ask why he was so exuberant; whence came this strange buoyancy which had restored him to her arms; and then she preferred not to know. When he was like this nothing else mattered. She even forgot her nagging fear.

But she remembered it in the morning, when, waking tardily, she found him still lightsome and inclined to conversation.

'I'm glad you gave that party, Judith. It was quite a success. We must have that fellow Fairchild out again."

Heartened by daylight, she took the situation firmly in hand.

"People like that are amusing, but you should be careful, Richard, how you endorse his fantastic ideas. Mr. Fairchild is a writer, and writers are expected to be a little eccentric. But you are a solid citizen, a man of some importance in your community. You don't want to be quoted as saying you believe the ghost of your dead wife is playing pranks in this house."

"But I do." He was smiling, inscrutably innocent. "Hiding those photographs out in the shed—her own photographs, mind you—is exactly the sort of perverted jest Abigail would delight in."

It was seconds before Judith could speak.

"You don't believe any such thing, and it's too early in the morning to be funny."

"I'm not being funny. You know we agreed at the time that only two people could have accomplished it by natural means: you and Thorne. Of course it was neither of you, so it must have been accomplished by supernatural means." He had taken his stand. Apparently nothing could shake him from it.

"I'd advise you not to let your mother hear you voice such an opinion," said Judith, and sprang quickly out of bed before he could discover her trembling.

This was the beginning of a subtle change in their relationship. It was also the beginning of a change in the house at Timberley which in time was felt by all its inmates. At first it was felt by none but Judith, who queerly shrank from giving utterance to her forebodings. But when the talk at her party was reported—as it inevitably was, by young Will—Judith was astonished to discover that Richard's stand did not shock anyone, not even his mother. In this sternly orthodox household she sensed a feeling which she could not have defined but with which she was to grow more and more familiar. It spread from Millie's kitchen to the big room upstairs which the children shared with Miss Ann. That this feeling was unacknowledged, tacitly ignored, made it the more manifest.

Spring came early that year. By the first of April the lilacs were a green mist. Redbirds whistled from the cedar trees; catbirds called from the woods. Coming home from school, the children found violets and snowdrops blooming along their path. On the banks of Little Raccoon the redbud floated like a pillar of fire.

The young Tomlinsons, loitering one evening, saw a covered wagon cross the bridge and whooped joyously, for this was a sure sign of approaching summer. When they reached home they found, as anticipated, that the wagon had turned in at Timberley and its occupants—two brothers from Ohio named Cochran—were spending the night. This meant there would be tales of adventure and misadventure around the evening fire. Thorne, setting the table for supper, sang, "Oh! Susanna, don't you cry for me!" The sight of a covered wagon wakened nostalgic yearnings sometimes for the vagabond existence of the wayfarers.

It was during a lull in her crooning that she became aware of voices in the hall outside the dining-room door.

"I suggest, Richard, that we dispense with prayers tonight, since there are strangers among us."

"Why should we? We're not dispensing with supper."

"Don't be facetious, dear."

"I didn't mean to be. Hospitality is offering your home to your guest, isn't it? Timberley, without family prayers, is not the home of the Tomlinsons."

"For all you know, these Cochrans may not be Protestants."

"They are no less welcome to join us if they care to. If they don't, they can retire."

"All of which is most embarrassing."

"No more than a preference for white meat instead of dark."

His imperturbable calm seemed to irritate his companion, for her voice rose impatiently.

"Family worship is an outmoded custom. It belongs to the days of Puritanism, I'm trying to make of Timberley a cultured home, and this nightly exhibition of religion makes it seem like a backwoods farmhouse."

"What is it except a farmhouse?"

"It's not a backwoods cabin, at any rate. Though it might be, from some of its customs."

"Are you suggesting that prayers be discontinued—permanently?"

"Not immediately, of course, on your mother's account. But I do favor a gradual tapering off. That's why I suggest that you omit them this evening—when you've a very good excuse—then later drop to once or twice a week—and eventually stop altogether. How does that strike you?"

"It strikes me as curious that you never objected to prayers before we were married."

"I was a boarder in the house then; I had no voice in its management. But now I'm its mistress. I think my wishes should be respected."

There was no reply. The dining-room door was flung open, and Judith came in with high color and a look of exasperation. She demanded of Thorne, "What are you doing here?" and without waiting for the obvious answer took the silver from her hands and told her to go to the kitchen and help Millie. With only a swift glance at Richard, who had followed his wife into the room, Thorne obeyed. She could not tell from his remote expression whether Judith had won her point or not, but the possibility depressed her. Her knowledge of God (once confined to Pete McGraw's profanity) was now all mixed up with her feeling for her friend. That he could yield a principle to please his wife troubled her.

When bedtime came two people waited with sharp anxiety for Richard's decision in the matter. When he picked up the Bible as usual, inviting his transient guests to join in the family ritual if they so desired, excusing them if they did not (the Cochran brothers chose to remain), Judith caught a look from Thorne which, to her incensed imagination, seemed to sparkle with triumph.

Judith's face turned livid with anger. Her humiliation was twofold because Thorne had witnessed her defeat. She returned the girl's bright glance with a fixed hard stare that caused Thorne to retire to a remote corner and sit down in the shadow of the big clock.

As Judith watched Richard turning the leaves of the Bible,

looking for some favorite passage, she heard the clock begin to strike.

It was the strangest thing to Judith that no one seemed to react to the stroke of the clock. Richard looked up, as did everyone, but they looked at Judith, who had given a queer gasp. She muttered, "The clock!" and Richard glanced at the clock on the mantel which pointed to twenty minutes of nine. The hands of the big clock stood at half-past one. He nodded, "Yes, we're late," and went on turning the pages of the Bible. The clock struck again. The tone of the gong was deep and ominous. It fell chillingly on the ear like some dread warning.

It was not until the third stroke that startled looks began to appear in the fireside circle as faces turned toward Judith, who had made a strangling sound and put her hand to hei throat. Ann Tomlinson hushed a whimpering child. But Richard seemed quite unmoved.

He began to read, choosing the first line his eye fell upon, surely, or he never would have read that particular passage.

" 'Then Saul said unto his servants. Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her, and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.' "

He paused, frowning, as though that was not what he had intended to read. But when he started to change his selection Judith's voice arrested him:

"Go on, Richard. This is an appropriate time to read the story of a witch."

He looked about the room as though in search of someone. The candlelight did not penetrate the corner where Thorne sat in the shadow of the clock. Richard resumed his reading. He read the whole story of Saul consulting the witch of Endor and bringing the ghost of Samuel up from the grave to answer his questions. As long as the reading continued Judith counted the strokes of the clock.

Verse after verse Richard read: from the forecast of Saul's death at the hands of his enemies, to the panic of the poor frightened witch woman, who had killed her fatted calf for the king when she learned with whom she had been trafficking. To the end of the chapter Richard read, apparently oblivious of the striking clock. When his voice ceased, the clock stopped. Judith had counted one hundred and forty-four strokes.

There was a moment of silence before the summons to prayer. A leaping flame in the fireplace threw a rosy shadow across the face of the clock, and Judith saw that the hands, which had been fixed at half-past one, now pointed to a quarter of three.

Abigail had died at a quarter of three.

When the others knelt in the nightly petition Judith did not join them. Her eyes searched the room for Thorne. As the concerted murmur of "Our Father which art in heaven" rose about her, she strained her ear for a clear young voice she would have recognized in any choral chant. She did not hear it. Her pale face was glowing with elation when the others rose from their knees.

"This is a trick I had nothing to do with," she thought. ''This time we've caught Thorne red-handed."

There was no comment on the clock's behavior as long as the strangers were present. But when they had been shown to a room upstairs Judith demanded that Richard examine the erratic timepiece. He inquired mildly why he should examine a clock at this time of night.

"To see who's inside it," said Judith.

Amid a pregnant silence, with the entire household looking at her most strangely, she repeated her demand that Richard explore the interior of the clock.

"There's no one inside it," said Richard. "There couldn't be."

Judith pointed to a little door in the side of the cabinet

large enough to permit a very small person (or child) to conceal himself in the clock.

"Where were the children during the Bible reading?" she asked.

Miss Ann answered for her grandsons. They had sat throughout the evening, where they were at this moment, on the hearthrug.

People were looking at Judith very curiously now.

''Where was Thorne?" she asked sharply.

A husky voice answered, "Here," and Thorne rose up from a cushion in the corner, so nearly invisible in her gray dress that she seemed a part of the shadows.

"You were inside the clock, weren't you, Thorne?" said Judith.

Thorne said, "No," and looked surprised.

Richard said, "Of course she wasn't in the clock," as though the idea were absurd. "She never left that stool, I saw her there all evening."

He couldn't have seen her; Judith knew he couldn't have seen Thorne from where he was sitting. Something tightened in her throat: anger for her husband's partisanship and a desperate need to prove Thorne guilty. She felt that she could not bear it if the girl were cleared of this mischief. The mere thought filled her with uncontrollable nervous excitement. She was conscious of intense cold; the temperature of the room seemed to have dropped several degrees. Shadows closed round her like a smothering fog. She had the strangest difficulty in breathing. . . .

When she looked about the room she found that she and Richard were alone. He was standing beside her, a glass of water in his hand, and she was tugging at the band of ribbon around her throat. She asked where everyone was. He told her his mother had taken the children upstairs; the others had retired. She thought, "Here! I can't have anything like this happening. What made me faint?"

He asked, ''Feel all right now?"

She answered, "Certainly," as though the question were irrelevant. But she noted that she was sitting on the couch. She had been standing when that queerness seized her.

"There's a reasonable explanation for all this, Richard." She resumed the argument as though there had been no interruption. "The sound we heard did not come from this room. Somewhere else in the house a clock was striking."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Judith. There's not a clock in this house that strikes."

"I know that. That's why I say someone was hiding in the cabinet, making the clock strike."

"You mean that clock?" Richard turned to look at the tall clock in the shadowy corner. "That clock couldn't be made to strike. Half its works are missing. It has no bell."

"But it did strike," said Judith. "It struck one hundred and forty-four times. I counted. And the hands moved from half-past one to quarter of three."

He picked up a candle and went over to the clock and held the taper so that the light fell across its face. The hands rested, where they had rested for years, at half-past one.

He said quietly, "The clock didn't strike, Judith. It couldn't have struck without my hearing it."

Judith gasped, "You—didn't hear it?"

He shook his head.

"But you must have heard it. Everyone else did."

"No." His eyes rested on her, half curiously, half solicitously. "No one heard anything. When you fainted, Mother asked what there was about the clock to alarm you."

"He's lying," thought Judith, and pushed back the creeping horror that assailed her. They were all lying to protect that girl. She must believe this, even though it was the last step in the progress of her defeat. She was more conscious at the moment of defeat than of fear, because she saw with terrible prescience that there would be no end to eerie mischief in

this house. And Richard would defend Thorne to the extent of denying what his ears had heard and his eyes had seen. That the alternative to Thorne's guilt was one which filled his wife with horror apparently had no weight with him. The calm finality of his allegiance was devastating.

She heard his voice remotely. ''Come upstairs, Judith. You'll feel all right after a good night's sleep."

CHAPTER 18

It was the hottest summer in years: the greatest corn weather, the most bountiful harvest since the war. It seemed to Judith that she never saw her husband any more. He was out of doors from daybreak till dark and at night he was asleep, from sheer healthy exhaustion, as soon as he touched the bed. She grew to hate the summer before it was over.

The children, too, were out of doors all day. Sometimes when Judith appeared belatedly for breakfast and inquired for them, she was told, "They went with Richard over to the south forty this morning." This tract of Timberley land lay beyond Little Raccoon. When the men worked there they seldom came home at noon. They took a substantial lunch with them.

"Did Thorne go too?"

"Yes. The men wanted coffee for dinner, so Richard took Thorne along to make it."

All day Judith's mind held the picture of a picnic shared by congenial spirits on the bank of a shady creek.

Day after day it was like that. Thorne never seemed to be in the house when Richard was out of it. Judith took to watching from windows when it was time for his return. If the two came in together she was wretched. If he came in alone her unleashed imagination ran rampant.

She suggested to her mother-in-law that Thorne be given more duties about the house. Indoors, as well as outdoors, the work of the farm was doubled during the summer months. Endless preserving of the abundant fruit, drying of beans and peas for winter, cooking for the additional labor employed. The Tomlinson daughters frequently lent a hand, but there was still work enough to keep Miss Ann busy from morning till night.

"Thorne should be taking some of this drudgery off you,' said Judith, ignoring her own remissness. But the older woman did not agree.

''Thorne does enough for her age. Let her play while she can."

Ann Tomlinson felt, as she grew older, an increasing yearning toward the young. She had not felt it so much with her own children because she had been still young herself. But now that she was old and seasoned with living, she could understand the pain of growing up. She could not look at Thorne these days without a strange compassion. So she said to Judith, "Let her alone. This is the last summer she will be a child."

May had come and gone, likewise June and July, but there had been no party for the children. Perhaps Richard had forgotten; perhaps he had been too busy. Since only Judith remembered his plan, there was no one to remind him—or be disappointed.

In August the trees hung motionless, heavy with foliage; the air was murmurous with the drone of insects. Judith would go up to her room at night to find it swarming with mosquitoes, gnats, and millers. She would drive out as many as possible with a paper fly brush, then pull down the windows, strip off her clothes, and fling herself upon the sun-baked bed. She might as well have flung herself upon a hot griddle. In a matter of seconds she was off the bed, divesting it of sheets and pillows, in the delusion that the bare mattress was cooler. When Richard came in he would gasp, ''Whew! Why don't you raise the windows?" and immediately fling them wide open. In would troop the old enemy with reinforcements, and the battle with the insects would begin again. There was mosquito netting over the beds, but wire screens were an innovation which had not yet reached Woods County. Judith wondered how she had ever fancied the country would be more pleasant in summer than the town.

"You don't have to sleep up here," Richard reminded her. "There's a bedroom downstairs with an eastern exposure, and it's comfortable on the hottest nights. There's no point in punishing yourself by sleeping up under the roof."

He refrained from mentioning the obvious fact that she was punishing him too. He was still very polite in all their intimate relations. If she preferred to swelter upstairs, he would not leave her to swelter alone. But he delicately hinted that he considered it a piece of foolisliness.

"This is the hottest room in the house because it's only a half story. Last summer when Thorne had it, she used to sleep outdoors in the hammock because she couldn't stand it up here."

Judith asked idly, "Wasn't she afraid?"

"What of? The hammock was swung between two trees just outside my window. She couldn't have moved without my hearing her."

"I see. You slept downstairs last summer."

"I did. And there wasn't a night that I couldn't stand a sheet over me."

She scarcely heard him. Her mind was filled with a picture of Thorne asleep in a swaying hammock beside an open window; and on the other side of the window Richard, alert even in slumber for every movement in the hammock.

"I wish you'd try it downstairs just one night, Judith. If you don't have the best sleep you've had in weeks I'll never mention the subject again."

Her own discomfort finally drove her to accept his suggestion. Her reluctance in the first place had come more from morbid distaste than superstitious fear. Now, on investigation, she found that the room in summer dress did not reek so strongly of Abigail as she had expected. The bed was gay with cool fresh chintz, the fireplace banked with honeysuckle, and the tree-shaded south windows were covered with cotton netting. It was possible to keep both cool and unbitten down here. The candlelit bogies of a winter fireside vanished in the bright white heat of an August day.

She slept one night in Abigail's room.

She was fully prepared to lie awake in nervous insomnia or be troubled with fitful dreams. Instead, she slept so soundly that not even Richard's rising at daylight wakened her. He dressed quickly, quietly, and left her sleeping. But as he opened the outer door and stepped immediately into the morning coolness of dew-drenched shrubs and bluegrass, the comfort and convenience of his old room struck him as never before. He hoped fervently that Judith slept till she was rested. He wanted her to be so charmed with this room that she would never wish to sleep upstairs again.

The children came round the corner of the house, barefoot and scantily clothed. Ricky and Rodgie wore nothing but panties and Thorne the briefest of pinafores. They hailed Richard with the announcement that they were bound for the creek and invited him to join them in a swim. He hushed them softly, vehemently, and led them away from Judith's window. Ten minutes later, stripped to his underclothes, he was splashing in the deepest pool in Little Raccoon, teaching the boys to float. When he offered to teach Thorne she paddled away from him and climbed out on the bank. He shouted to her, but she called back that she was going to look for berries and ran dripping toward the woods. He decided the boys had had enough swimming and ordered them out of the water, but by the time he had dressed there was no sight of Thorne. She had disappeared.

Judith slept until the sun rose high enough to pierce the east window. There was no net over this window because Abigail had had it nailed down against the winter snows. But there was a window blind, and Judith wished drowsily that Richard would lower it. Then she realized that Richard was up and abroad and she had overslept.

She did not rise immediately. The outer door was open, and she lay luxuriating in the fresh breeze coming from the south. How silly she had been to hold out against this delightful room. Coming down here was like moving to a different climate.

At the first peal of the breakfast bell she sprang up and dressed briskly. She was so rested, so full of energy, that she could think of any number of pleasant things to do this morning. She paused for a last glance in the mirror of the big walnut dresser, which stood in the corner between the east window and the south door. She heard a pane of glass shatter in the window and something hurtle behind her to fall with a thud near the door.

She screamed, wheeling in alarm to stare at the object that had narrowly missed her head. It was a half brick, heavy enough to have killed her had it struck her.

A murmur of voices came down the hall. There were hurried footsteps in the passage and Richard's voice outside the door. "Are you all right, Judith?"

She said, "Come in."

"I thought I heard you scream," he said as he entered. "What happened?"

Judith said, "A brick came through that window. It was thrown."

"Where is it now?" asked Richard.

Judith pointed to the spot where the brick had landed.

It was gone.

Richard said, "There's nothing there."

She stared at the spot, dumfounded. "It came through the east window. I heard the crash of glass."

"That window is open," said Richard. "I got up in the night and pried the nails loose and raised it." He went over to the window and pushed back the muslin curtain. Neither glass nor netting prevented the breeze from blowing through the room. "I guess you heard Millie break something in the kitchen," he said lightly.

Judith drew her hand across her eyes. It was possible that a crash in the kitchen had come simultaneously with the hurling of the brick. . . .

"But I saw the brick. I felt a whisssssh! of air as it passed my head. Someone threw a brick through that window, then ran around the corner of the house, reached through the door, and recovered it while my back was turned."

Richard stepped to the open door and searched the premises with a keen glance. Suddenly his hand came up with a gesture as involuntary as breathing.

Judith said, "It's too late to warn her, Richard. I've seen her."

Thorne was approaching the house, her apron filled with berries.

She was still wet from her swim in the creek. Her dark hair dripped liquid gold where the sun touched it; the childish pinafore clung damply to her small body. The two in the doorway watched her approach; the man's eyes fixed upon the dripping curls and berry-stained face, the woman's upon the budding curves revealed by the clinging apron.

Judith said, "Did you throw that brick, Thorne?"

Thorne said, "what brick?"

"Judith thought she saw someone throw a brick," said Richard.

"Where would I get a brick?" said Thorne.

"Exactly," said Richard. "Where would she get a brick? There's none on this farm." He was beginning to speak impatiently. "Furthermore, there's no brick in the room. Are you right sure, Judith, you didn't imagine the whole thing?"

Judith chilled, though the August morning was already hot. She felt as if there were someone close beside her—not Richard, closer than that—close enough to touch her. She moved farther back into the room, and when something brushed her thigh she almost swooned. She had backed into the bed.

"I'm moving upstairs again," she announced. "I never liked sleeping on the ground floor. I tried it to please you, Richard, but I much prefer the bird's-eye-maple room."

He made no comment. He told Thorne to go wash her face and hands for breakfast, and when they went into the dining room he explained to the others that some hoodlum had thrown a brick through the bedroom window. "He must have got frightened when he heard Judith scream and retrieved his missile, because the brick's disappeared."

That was the first brick. It was not the last. Judith heard and saw them intermittently for several weeks. Always half bricks; always through the same window, the one Abigail had nailed down. In what ever part of the house Judith might be at the time, she could distinctly hear the heavy thud as the brick hit the floor. She would rush immediately to the south room and find the missile lying where she had seen the first. But when she had hastened to bring some other member of the family to verify what she had seen, the brick would be gone.

Because of the heat the window was still open. Judith no longer heard a crash of glass when the brick fell. Miss Ann suggested closing the window.

"Then we'll know whether the brick comes through there or not. A shattered windowpane is substantial evidence."

"You think I'm lying?" said Judith.

"No, no, my dear." No one doubted Judith's testimony regarding the bricks. She was too intelligent to be suspected of hallucination, as Abigail had been, and her reaction to the disturbance was too sincere to permit a doubt of her veracity. "But it's just possible the sound you hear is something outside the house," said Miss Ann, "because no one else ever hears anything."

The brick thrower seemed to confine his activities to periods when only Judith was in the vicinity of the south room.

"But I saw the brick. Time and again I've seen a brick on the floor."

"And you always run to fetch someone, which gives the culprit time to make off with it. Next time pick the brick up before you leave the room."

But Judith could not bring herself to touch the bricks. Neither would she allow Miss Ann to close the window. She had a horrible fear of hearing the crash of glass again and finding the brick as usual, and of finding the windowpane unbroken. Better to cling to the alternative made possible by the open window and the convenient door.

The Tomlinsons searched the countryside for the tramp or urchin who might be responsible for the mischief, but no such person was found. News of the disturbance spread throughout the neighborhood, and self-elected guards posted themselves at outlying points of vantage to watch for the culprit. But the brick thrower was never seen.

Judith insisted that Thorne was guilty. For a time she was able to persuade others to this opinion, particularly young Will. The bricks always seemed to come when Thorne was out of the house. In vain did Richard caution her to stay withindoors until the nuisance could be tracked to its source. When Thorne remained in the house nothing happened.

As the suspicions of the others deepened against her, Richard grew more frantic. He had words with his entire family. He had violent arguments with his wife. Their disputes were the more bitter because Judith's insistence upon Thorne's guilt was based on a fear which Richard, in his desperation, continually fostered. He had said once, lightly, that he thought it possible the spirit of his dead wife might be plaguing them. He stated now, unequivocably, that only Abigail could devise so cunning a persecution as this incrimination of an innocent girl. His words shocked his family, but he did not care. He would fight both the living and the dead in Thorne's defense.

As for Thorne, she had nothing to say beyond her repeated assertion that she had no knowledge of this thing. But she grew thin and pale with nervous anxiety. She stayed indoors when Richard so ordered, effacing herself from Judith's eye by industriously helping Miss Ann, But when the strain of her position grew more than she could bear she would escape to the woods and the solitude which now provided her only respite. Invariably, when she returned to the house, she would find that Judith had heard and seen another brick.

One evening Thorne was returning after a full day's absence. She had fled early in the morning from Judith's tongue, and so hopeless had seemed her plight that she had seriously considered running away and never coming back. But toward sundown she remembered that Richard would be coming from the fields before long, so she turned her steps toward home.

Dusk had fallen by the time she came within sight of the house. The log kitchen glowed with lighted windows, and red sparks flew from its chimney. Appetizing odors reminded her that she had had nothing to eat since breakfast. As she started up the slope from the springhouse she saw a familiar figure cross the barn lot and her heart swelled like a homing pigeon's. "Richard's home," she thought happily, and started running.

Judith, watching from the kitchen window, also saw Richard coming from the barn. She likewise caught sight of Thorne running to meet him. She slipped outside, determined to forestall the meeting. As she stood watching Thorne's flying figure she saw the girl pitch suddenly, violently, forward and then lie very still.

Judith ran swiftly down the slope to be at the spot before Richard. She would spare him the necessity of drying Thorne's tears.

But Thorne was not weeping. She was lying still as death, with a great bleeding cut on her head. On the ground close by, Judith saw a half brick.

Her first thought was that Richard must not see that brick. He would take it as concrete proof of Thorne's innocence. Because Thorne could not possibly have struck herself with the brick at which Judith was now staring.

She could hear her husband's pounding footsteps. He was running from the barn. She must dispose of the brick before he reached them. . . .

She could not bring herself to pick it up.

Richard knelt in the path, lifting Thorne in his arms, cursing softly in his rage and anxiety. "My poor Cricket! What happened?" he asked Judith.

Judith said, "Put her down. She'll come out of her faint quicker."

He laid Thorne gently on the grass. Then he wet his hand-kerchief in the overflow from the spring and bathed her face. Judith wondered how much longer it would be before he saw the brick.

"There must be a rock in this path that tripped her," he said.

"Do you see anything?" asked Judith.

"No." His eyes scanned the darkening hillside. "whatever it was must be close by." He searched the grass. The brick lay near the spot where he had put Thorne. His eyes moved over it as though it were not there.

Suddenly panic gripped Judith. It became more important for Richard to see the brick than for herself to preserve the fiction of Thorne's guilt.

She cried, 'There, stupid! There on the ground beside her is the thing that felled her."

His gaze followed her pointing finger. He said, "I don't see anything."

"Look where I'm pointing," cried Judith—and then stopped.

The brick was gone.

"That's nothing but a clump of grass," said Richard. "Here's what probably did the mischief." With the toe of his boot he scraped the hard-packed earth from an embedded rock in the path.

Thorne was beginning to regain consciousness. Richard lifted her in his arms and carried her up to the house. Judith followed, like a woman in a dream.

They found Miss Ann in the kitchen with Millie.

"Get ointment and bandages, Mother. Thorne's had an accident."

Ann Tomlinson gasped at sight of the girl's bloody head. Millie groaned, "Oh Lawdy!" and set down a tray of dishes with a clatter.

"what happened to her?" asked Miss Ann.

"She was running up the hill and took a nasty fall."

"What tripped you, child?"

Thorne murmured, "I don't know." She was feeling faint again. "I don't know what happened."

Richard said, "Luckily I saw the whole thing. So did Judith." He then described the incident. Young Will and Jesse Moffat came in while he was talking and listened with interest.

"There was a rock embedded in the path which must have tripped her," finished Richard. "At least it was the only thing we could find. And we both looked, didn't we, Judith?"

Judith said coldly, "Thorne didn't trip over anything."

"What do you mean?" said Richard sharply.

Judith said to Thorne, "What did you do wth that brick?"

"What brick?" said Thorne blankly.

Richard said, "What are you talking about, Judith?"

"When I reached Thorne there was a brick on the ground beside her." Judith's face was pale, but there was no hysteria in her voice. "I pointed it out to you, Richard. But you pretended not to see it until Thorne had time to conceal it beneath her skirt."

"Judith! Do you accuse Thorne of giving herself a blow that knocked her unconscious?"

"No. I accuse her of taking a stage fall, first dropping a brick beside the path to make it look as though she had been struck down bv our brick thrower."

But the idea of Thorne's having a heavy brickbat concealed on her person was too preposterous to be credited. Besides, the girl's injuries were serious enough to preclude malingering. There was outspoken, indignant rejection of Judith's theory.

Jesse Moffat, however, was inclined to agree that Thorne might have been struck by a brick. "If Judith says she seen one, I reckon she seen it. Somebody might have made off with it before Richard got there, but it couldn't have been Thorne, with her knocked unconscious."

Richard said, "If Judith did see a brick, then this clears Thorne of throwing them." Will's eyes rested on the girl as though he were ashamed of the stand he had previously taken.

Judith made one last effort. "It's been your contention, Richard, that these bricks have been thrown for the purpose of incriminating Thorne. In that case, why would her enemy exonerate her by striking her down?"

He had an answer, even for that. "The malice that failed to drive her from home might have decided to kill her and have done with it."

Without another word Judith left the kitchen and went up to her room. She felt as though she had reached the limit of her endurance. All during these terrible weeks she had clung to her conviction of Thorne's guilt as a drowning man clings to a spar. Now it had been wrested from her by a wave which threatened to engulf her. For if Thorne was not guilty of this mischief—whence came those bricks and whither did they go?

She had seen them again and again; yet when she brought others to view them they were never there. Who, besides herself, would go to any lengths to prove they had been thrown by human hands?

Her desperation furnished the answer. Lighting a candle, she sat down at her desk, took a fresh quill pen, and rapidly covered a sheet of note paper With her clear, impersonal handwriting. When she had finished she locked the letter in her desk, pending an opportunity to mail it.

There was a cessation of her torment after that. For weeks the letter lay in her desk, not forgotten, but postponed, like a desperate remedy to be used only in extremity. Then when the harvest was in and Richard made his usual trip to the city, Judith was ill and unable to accompany him. Instead of deferring the excursion, he went off by himself, returning late the same day, pockets bulging with gifts for everyone, and bearing a large dressmaker's box which Judith was sure contained the new faille silk she had been wanting. But when the box was opened it was found that the object of his trip had been to buy Thorne the long-promised new dress.

It was then that Judith decided to post the letter she had written to Otis Huse.

CHAPTER 19

The square in Woodridge was a sea of mud. Wagons and buggies, mired to the hub, crept sluggishly. Horses and mules, flat-eared and streaming, stood resignedly at hitching posts. The hot spell had broken with an equinoctial storm. It had rained for a week.

Two men sat in the bar of the hotel, morosely regarding the weather.

"If this keeps up much longer there'll be another flood."

The speaker was a drummer from Indianapolis. He carried a line of household supplies: toilet goods, patent medicines, thread, needles, pins, et cetera. Crossroads stores were his clientele, the weather his concern.

"Little Raccoon is over its banks. Sure plays whaly with my business."

The other man merely looked bored.

"I'm in the commercial line," explained the drummer. "What's yours?"

"People," said the other shortly, and stood up, stretching his legs. He was a tall man, dressed genteelly but rather funereally in black. His saturnine expression and cryptic reply led the drummer to wonder if he might be the local undertaker.

He inquired respectfully, "Live around here?"

The gentleman said, "Yes," and rubbed a clear spot on the steaming windowpane, as though looking for someone down the muggy street. "Tm a lawyer," he added curtly.

The drummer looked properly impressed, but before he could frame a suitable comment the hotel manager, who was also clerk and occasional bartender, came in to light the lamps and announce that supper was being served in the dining room. The lawyer inquired if the hack had come up yet from the station.

"No, Mr. Huse." The tone was deferential. "I've been keeping watch. If you care to go in to supper I'll call you the minute the hack reaches the square."

Otis Huse nodded his acceptance of this courtesy and went into the dining room. The drummer, to whom any companionship was manna from heaven, promptly followed.

There was a sprinkling of local patronage in the hotel dining room on account of the rain, which prevented country people from getting home. As Otis Huse looked about him he was glad he had the drummer in tow, for the garrulous fellow would insure him against the danger of being joined by some acquaintance. He was in no mood tonight to give more than a nod to people he knew.

So when their supper of spareribs, boiled cabbage, fried potatoes, and apple pie had been put before them, Huse thawed sufficiently to listen to the salesman's chatter. He suddenly realized the talkative stranger might be able to give him information.

"You've been out through the county this month?"

"From Bridgeport to Mullen's Mill. Never missed a crossroad."

"Did you stop at a place called Timberley?"

"Sure. The store just beyond the second tollgate."

"There's a farm by that name too."

"I know. But I don't call at private houses. Peddlers do that. I'm strictly wholesale." The drummer drew himself up a bit as he reached for the salt shaker. "I know the farm though. Belongs to a man named Tomlinson. From what I hear, he's somebody in these parts."

"What do you mean—by what you hear?"

The drummer looked cagey. "Oh, nothing. Only Wither-spoon—he's the Timberley storekeeper—warned me Tomlinson was not the sort of gent you carry tales about."

"Tales?" The lawyer's pale eyes kindled with interest. "You mean there is gossip about the Tomlinsons?"

The drummer glanced about the room, discreetly noting the diners. They were farmers mostly, as was evidenced by their weathered faces and the gusto with which they attacked the rather frugal fare provided by the house. At a near-by table a gaunt, loose-jointed fellow in a coonskin cap was stolidly eating his way through a double portion of everything on the bill of fare. Recognizing him, the drummer pointed him out, saying, "There's the party who was doing the most talking."

Otis Huse cast an obhque glance as directed and identified Henry Schook.

"What sort of talk was he spreading?"

"The damnedest cock-and-bull story you ever heard." The drummer dropped his voice. "It seems Tomlinson's wife claims that somebody has been throwing bricks through a certain window of their house, trying to frighten her."

So it was true, thought the lawyer. The letter had not exaggerated. Could Henry Schook have written it? Hardly.

He said aloud, "Some youngster with a grudge against the lady. She used to teach the Timberley school, you know."

"I said it was a young one too," agreed the drummer. "But down at the store they're saying no one is throwing the bricks. They've watched, it seems. Tomlinson's wife has reported bricks falling inside the house when there was never a soul in sight to throw 'em."

"Do they question the woman's sanity?" asked Huse dryly.

"Oh no. She's considered the most intelligent female in the district. But about this window—it's a bedroom window, downstairs"—the drummer leaned across the table impressively—"and they say it's the room in which Tomlinson's first wife died."

The lawyer moistened his lips. This was what he had been waiting for. Now he knew for a fact that the letter was worth investigating.

"Are they trying to make something of that?"

"Are they! Listen. You know George Tunney—has a workshop here in Woodridge—buggies, light spring wagons, coffins, and pumps?"

The lawyer's nod duly accredited this witness.

"Tunney's just installed a new pump in the kitchen at Timberley. And he had a lot to tell. He went so far as to say there'd been something funny about the first Mrs. Tomlinson's death.

But I think he's just sore because Tomlinson sent to Indianapolis for her casket instead of giving him the job." The drummer grinned at this professional pique on the part of local industry.

"But there are others," he went on, "farm hands, boys around the livery stable, plenty of people talking about the queer doings out at Timberley. Haven't you heard any of it?"

"I would be the last person to hear such things," said Otis Huse. Then he added carelessly, "Was there any talk about a girl out there who's said to be a witch?"

"Sa-a-a-ay! How do you know about that?" The drummer looked startled. "I never told you. That's the thing Wither-spoon warned me to keep under my hat. He said Tomlinson would stop at nothing short of violence to keep down talk about that little girl."

The lawyer looked bitter. "And what does Tomlinson say to this superstitious talk about his dead wife?"

"Nothing. He pays no attention to it."

The hotel manager appeared. "The hack is in, Mr. Huse. Lucius Goff just went into the academy."

Otis Huse pushed back his chair without another word and hurried away. Before a waiter could clear the vacant place Henry Schook stalked across the room, combing his mustache with thumb and finger, and slid into the chair opposite the drummer.

"Howdy, Mr. Jenkins, remember me? Schook's my name. Heard you telling Otis Huse about the queer pranks out at Tomlinson's. You didn't know, did you, that you were talking to the first Mrs. Tomlinson's only surviving relative?" And with a gratified feeling of having punished the outlander for poaching on his preserves, the local news dispenser fell to upon the lawyer's untasted supper.

Behind the drawn blinds of the academy Otis Huse faced Richard Tomlinson's three friends with much the same sense of gratification. It was Lucius Goff whom he had wanted to see, but he considered it a stroke of luck to find John Barclay and Doc Baird with him. He came immediately, almost insolently, to the point.

"Which one of you sent me an anonymous letter?"

There were three prompt, matter-of-course denials.

"Why should you think one of us sent it?" frowned Lucius. He was dripping like a wet hound in front of the stove and inclined to be truculent.

"Because the subject of the letter was Richard Tomlinson."

The three friends were instantly alert. John Barclay said, "An anonymous letter is usually written by a coward. Since the writer hadn't the nerve to sign his name, I take it the letter was not friendly to Richard. It couldn't have been written by one of us."

"On the contrary," said Huse, "the letter was written by a friend of Tomlinson who waxed almost maudlin in his attempt to save a fool from his folly."

"What folly?" demanded the blacksmith.

"The folly of circulating lies about ghosts in order to conceal the mischief of that wicked girl."

Three glances encountered uneasily.

"Ghosts!"

"Who said anything about ghosts?"

"what mischief are you talking about?"

The lawyer's keen eyes darted from face to face. "That is something you should know better than I. You visit at Timberley. I do not. You doubtless have heard about Tomlinson's wife and the bricks she claims are being thrown at her."

Yes, they had heard about Judith's bricks.

"You must also have heard what Tomlinson is saying about the origin of those bricks."

No, this they had not heard.

"He is saying that the spirit of Abigail Tomlinson—my cousin—is tormenting his second wife."

At this statement, even the friends of Richard looked aghast.

"I don't beheve it." said Doc Baird.

John Barclay said, ''Richard would never say such a thing."

Lucius Goff asked, "Is that what the anonymous letter contained?" 

"It is."

"And you thought one of us wrote it?"

"Frankly, Lucius, I suspected you. You've always been interested in that devihsh cult of spirit rapping. I thought perhaps you had gone too far and got frightened by Tomlinson's gullibility. But now I'm convinced that the writer of this letter is more sincere than any of you; I mean, sincere with me. I'm going out to Timberley and get the truth of this matter."

The schoolmaster rose from his desk, almost in panic. "Mr. Huse, I beg of you, discount this whole business as the idle gossip of a country neighborhood." But even as he was wondering how he might get word to Richard, Lucius leaped blithely into the breach.

"You say you are going out to Timberley?"

"I am," said Otis Huse.

"May I ask when?"

"Tomorrow, if the weather permits."

"Then if you've no objection, I'll ride out with you. I've a birthday gift to take to Miss Ann."

The rain had stopped, but the streets were a churning mass of thick clay mud when the two men set out from Wood-ridge the next afternoon. Otis Huse kept good horses, and they were soon on the gravel road, where the buggy wheels gradually shed the mire of the town. But travel was slow and the day far spent by the time they turned down the lane between the poplars. An overcast sky warned that the storm was not over. Huse remarked carelessly that they might have to stay the night.

The house looked dignified as ever. Lucius scanned the premises, searching for signs of disorder. There were none to be seen. Even the heavy rains had not disturbed the tranquil tidiness of the place.

"There's the window the bricks went through, purportedly." Huse pointed with a flick of his whip to an east window in the south wing. It had been closed against the rain. The glass pane was intact. There had been no bricks, evidently, since the rain started.

"The downstairs bedroom," murmured Lucius thoughtfully.

"The room in which my cousin died," said Huse darkly, "from causes that were never satisfactorily determined."

"She died of membranous croup, didn't she?"

"That's what Caxton put on the death certificate, but he told me himself he found no phlegm in her throat." It was all too plain that the lawyer was seeking to inject a sinister note into the circumstances of Abigail Tomlinson's death.

They rang the bell on the front porch. After an interval the door was opened by Richard's wife.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Won't you come in?" The greeting was as cordial as though they had been expected. Otis Huse, who had long since made up his mind he did not like the woman who had succeeded his cousin, found himself grudgingly changing his opinion.

Lucius glibly explained that they were calling to bring felicitations to Miss Ann on her birthday, and Judith, after showing them into the front room, went to call her mother-in-law.

"Oh, Miss Ann! Come in, dear. You have company."

When Ann Tomlinson appeared, wearing her black alpaca and cameo brooch, it was apparent that some sort of festivity was afoot. If she was surprised to see Otis Huse, she did not betray it. She greeted both callers hospitably and invited them to remain for her birthday supper. All the floods ever brewed by the Wabash, she said with a twinkle, could not keep the Tomlinson clan from celebrating her birthday.

Even while she chattered with her visitors, married daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren began arriving, bearing gifts of homemade delicacies; and while the men joined the group in the front room, the women repaired to the kitchen and took over the business of preparing the feast. Before long odors seeped through the covered passage that set the men at the front of the house sniffing hungrily. Lucius glanced slyly at Otis Huse, The lawyer looked somewhat disgruntled. He had not come to Timberley to make merry, but he could hardly pick a quarrel with Richard while others were doing so. Lucius began to hope that he might be got back to Wood-ridge without mentioning the object of his call.

When Richard appeared his hope seemed assured. Otis Huse might be the last person in the world whom Richard would have thought of inviting to Timberley, but when he came unheralded he was treated as a chosen guest. In the face of such hospitality Huse could do no less than respond in kind. Lucius began to relax and enjoy himself.

It was Miss Ann's party. She sat in the seat of honor, her busy hands folded in her lap as placidly as though every nerve were not twitching to know what was going on in her kitchen. It was a time of utter relaxation for Millie, who retired to the chimney corner with her snuffbox and let the young folks do as they pleased. But not for worlds would Miss Ann have betrayed to her children that she might have preferred an orderly kitchen tomorrow to playing the fine lady tonight. It was the family tradition that she must have nothing to do with the preparation of her own birthday supper, so she sat in the front room, pretending to listen to the men's talk, while she tried to figure where she would put all these people to sleep.

Cousin Lutie Simms had arrived, which meant that she would have to occupy the big four-poster in the alcove. Thorne could sleep in the trundle, which would release one of the beds in Miss Ann's room. If the weather turned bad so that Lucius and Otis Huse had to stay, they could have the downstairs bedroom. It was silly to shut that room up simply because Judith had seen a few bricks come through the window. She would speak to Richard about it when she got the chance.

But she did not get the chance because his duties as host kept Richard busy. His wife had disappeared somewhere, leaving him to ease the constraint of the lawyer's presence and to see that young Will did not get into arguments with his brothers-in-law. Will was at the age when controversial discourse was the only sort in which he was proficient.

But Richard did not need any woman, thought his mother, to make people feel at ease beneath his roof. Her eyes followed him as he moved about the room. He was easily the handsomest man present and he wore his broadcloth suit and linen collar with a careless grace which even Lucius Goff might envy. Alec Mitchell and Hugh Turner, good men both, always managed to look uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes. But no one would ever take Richard for a farmer. When he smiled at her from time to time her heart swelled with pride and ultimate fulfillment.

Another pair of eyes watched Richard as he moved among his guests. Thorne had slipped in so unobtrusively that only one person had seen her. She sat on a hassock, quietly, saying not a word, because she did not want to be sent out to help in the kitchen or mind the younger children. Only her large eyes moved as they followed Richard about the room, and only Otis Huse took note of her.

Lucius, a time-honored visitor on this occasion, had brought Miss Ann a box of sweets from a Terre Haute confectioner's. The ribbons and lace paper, the delicate hues of bonbons and candied fruit delighted and somewhat awed the recipient. "My, my, it looks too pretty to eat," she murmured, candidly adding, "We won't pass it around till after supper or it'll spoil people's appetites." So the ornate box was set with other gifts on the shiny new sewing machine which was the gift of the entire family.

It was at this moment that Otis Huse chose to make a facetious remark, "Aren't you afraid to leave that lying around? The Timberley witch might get it."

The merry chatter was instantly stilled. Richard's face flushed ominously.

''There's no witch at Timberley."

"I've heard testimony to the contrary."

Lucius Goff's black eyes flashed the lawyer a warning threat, but it was blandly ignored.

Richard said, 'If you're referring to the practical joke played at our wedding, I can assure you that has been satisfactorily explained."

"I'm referring to a letter I received," said Huse, "advising me to investigate more recent mischief in this house and clear my dead cousin's memory by putting the blame where it belongs." He had not intended saying this much; but, once started, he seemed unable to stop.

Richard's flush paled to the cold white of implacable anger. But before he could trust himself to speak his younger brother had leaped to his feet.

"You two-faced son of a b--" Remembering his mother's presence. Will choked back the word. "You wolf in sheep's clothing! Coming here like a member of the family, on Mother's birthday, pretending friendship in order to spy on us. You never did like us. Now you see a chance to make trouble for us. I've a mind to throw you out of "

"Will!" Richard found his voice, temporarily lost in astonishment at his brother's tirade. Heretofore Will had been one of Thorne's accusers. Now he was furiously attacking her enemy.

"You are forgetting. Will, that Mr. Huse is our guest."

"He's no better than a spy."

"He is a guest and a relative of my children. You will please remember your manners."

The lad subsided sulkily, and Otis Huse was left feeling uncomfortably embarrassed. He muttered something about taking his leave, but rain had set in again and at this moment it came down in torrents, so that departure was out of the question.

He said to Richard, "I'm not trying to make trouble for anyone. But as your children's sole maternal relative, I think I've a right to firsthand information about the queer things happening around here." He glanced significantly at Thorne sitting tense and watchful on the hassock.

Involuntarily Richard's hand went out to her protectingly, though he did not touch her.

"I assure you nothing has happened worth investigating."

"You call bricks hurtling through a window, disappearing almost as soon as they fall, nothing. The memory of your children's dead mother insulted, blasphemous talk of her unquiet spirit—all this is nothing, I suppose. To me it indicates a mischief-maker who will not rest in the attempt to dishonor the dead."

In the uneasy silence which followed the door opened and Judith came into the room.

That she had been listening outside, Huse was certain. Her glance went first to him, as though in warning, before it turned upon Richard. And suddenly, intuitively, he knew who had sent him the anonymous letter. He watched with interest as she greeted her husband.

"I didn't know you had come in, dear." She lifted her face for an expected kiss, and as Richard bent to her lips other members of the family averted their eyes. Tomlinson husbands did not kiss their wives before a roomful of people.

Judith murmured audibly, "You still kiss like a bridegroom, darling," and brought a rush of color to his face.

There was a slight movement near the fireplace, the swish of a door closing, and the hassock was vacant. No one noted Thorne's departure except Otis Huse—and Judith.

"What's that on your arm?" Richard was asking, to cover the general embarrassment. A crocheted afghan, Judith explained, which she had made for Miss Ann. She spread it across her mother-in-law's knees, and while Ann Tomlinson examined the gift with genuine pleasure Judith went gaily to the piano.

"We must have music when Miss Ann goes out to supper. Will some gentleman be kind enough to give me a little assistance?"

There was an immediate rush of volunteers to raise the heavy lid of the piano. Miss Ann, looking on with amusement, wondered why it was that Hugh and Alec could watch their own wives struggle with a piano top and never lift a finger, yet they fairly stumbled over each other to wait on Richard's wife. Men were funny. They were this way or that, according to the woman who had hold of them. Her eyes searched for Richard, to share this joke with him, but he had left the room.

Judith took her place at the piano, surrounded by attentive males, and turned a sparkling face to her mother-in-law.

"What shall it be? Tonight is your night. Miss Ann. You must choose the song," and then before the older woman could reply, ''Why—where is Richard?"

"He went out," Miss Ann explained, "to look for Thorne, probably." And then she added, "Let's sing Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.' "

Judith's hand struck a chord, not harshly, which was well. For it was a discordant clash of notes, like teeth grinding against each other.

Richard's first remark, as he raised his head from saying grace, was addressed to his own small sons.

"This is your cousin Otis, boys. You've grown so tall since he saw you last that perhaps you'd better be introduced. Otis, the young man with the freckles is Richard; the one with the snub nose is Roger." He performed the introductions with a seriocomic twinkle that removed the last trace of embarrassment from the lawyer's presence among them.

Thorne had changed her dress. Instead of the drab gray homespun in which she had appeared before supper, she was decked out in a soft bright cherry-colored merino, with cherry-colored ribbons in her hair.

Judith noted the change with disapproval. "Thorne, who gave you permission to put on that dress? Go upstairs and take it off."

Richard said, "I told her to change, Judith, All the other young folks are dressed for a party."

This was true. From sixteen-year-old Nancy Turner to Jane's baby, the young people were "dressed up" for Miss Ann's birthday.

"She needn't have put on that dress, Richard."

"Why not? You say it's too frivolous for church and it's much too nice for school. So it should be just about right for a party, don't you think?"

Across the long table husband smiled at wife and invisible rapiers clashed between them.

"By all means, dear. If you insist upon her wearing the dress, let it be in the bosom of the family." Smiling, Judith appealed to her sisters-in-law. "No man knows how to select clothes for girls, does he?"

"Did Richard buy that dress?" Kate's eyes rested on Thorne dubiously, as though questioning her brother's taste.

Thorne said quickly, "He brought it to me from Terre Haute, and I like it better than any dress I ever had." She flung a loyal look toward the man at the head of the table and he smiled back at her.

"Thorne shares my fondness for colors. The others think we have bad taste."



Otis Huse watched Judith writhe behind her fixed, determined smile.

There was a birthday cake so huge that Miss Ann had to stand to cut it. There was floating island, which the children loved because it was so pretty. There were nuts and ladyfingers and fortunes told in coffee grounds and then, crowning excitement, there were charades in the front room.

This latest amusement had just reached the Timberley neighborhood and was extremely popular with old and young. Judith and Lucius Goff were elected captains, sides were chosen, and the fun began. Judith chose Otis Huse, Hugh Turner, Jane, Cousin Lutie, Nancy, and Ricky. On Lucius's side were Richard, Kate, Alec Mitchell, Jesse Moffat, Thorne, Will, and Jimmie Turner. The younger children and Miss Ann were audience.

Judith's side led, with a simple noun so obviously enacted that it was guessed immediately. Cousin Lutie, in a rocking chair, held Ricky on her lap, while he indulged in an extremely artificial paroxysm of coughing, which ceased when Jane appeared with bottle and spoon and liberally dosed him—presumably with cough syrup. In the second scene Otis Huse sat behind a table, looking bored but professional, and advised Hugh Turner about the legality of a business transaction. When Hugh had agreed to follow his attorney's advice he inquired how much he owed him. Mr. Huse replied that his fee was two dollars. A chorus of voices shouted, "Cof-fee!"

When Lucius's troupe took the stage it appeared that something more ambitious was to be offered. Furniture was rearranged, more candles were lighted, and a fair semblance of a hotel lobby was achieved. All the company were on stage, sitting, standing, talking together, while Jesse Moffat wandered among them droning in his best hogcaller's voice, "Call for Mr. Jones! Call for Mr. Jones!" in comical imitation of a bellboy.

In the midst of this activity Thorne came in and asked if some lady would lend her a handkerchief. Kate produced a lace-trimmed bit of linen with the admonition to take care of it. Thorne assured her that the borrowed article would not be damaged.

Lucius then entered, very dapper with walking stick and hat, and struck a match to hght his cigar. He was about to throw the match away when Thorne stopped him. "Don't throw it on the floor. You'll burn the carpet."

Frowning dramatically, he looked about for a place to toss the burning match. Thorne said, "Let me have it," and taking the match from Lucius, she dropped it, blazing, into Kate's dainty handkerchief and squeezed it up in her hand. Kate cried that her handkerchief was ruined, but Thorne only laughed and shook it out prettily by one comer. The match had disappeared. There was no burn or smudge on the handkerchief.

Lucius and Kate cried, "It's magic!" Jesse Moffat shouted, "Call for Mr. Jones!" The word was "magical," but no one bothered to guess. No one was interested in charades any more. They were interested only in Thorne's magic tricks.

She went through her entire little repertoire because no one disapproved and Richard smiled encouragement. Perhaps he had a purpose in it, for Otis Huse could not fail to see how innocent her little sleight-of-hand performance really was. She plucked cards from the lapels of men's coats and made paper flowers bloom in women's hair. She caused Alec's and Will's wallets to change places in each other's pockets and pulled a tiny red ball out of Jane's snood. Each trick brought heartier applause and increased astonishment, until she glowed like a rose with her pretty triumphs. Never before had she been allowed to display her talents; never had she looked so captivating as while mystifying her audience with the old act of Thomdyke the Magician.

Otis Huse, standing near Judith, admitted without prejudice that the child was exceedingly clever. "She ought to be on the stage," he said.

Judith agreed. "She belongs in a theater, not in a private home."

The acid in the words was not lost upon the lawyer. He shrewdly guessed that this second wife of Richard Tomlinson hated the pretty child as violently as had his cousin, and the knowledge gave him curious satisfaction. It also, oddly, lessened his suspicions of Thorne. Jealousy, he decided, had prompted the writing of that anonymous letter.

"It was you who sent me the letter, wasn't it?" His cold light eyes bored deep into Judith's.

"Yes," she admitted, and felt a chill creep down her back as she realized what she had revealed. Now this man knew her weakness. This kinsman of Abigail's knew that she was no stronger, no happier, than the woman she had supplanted.

You'll know what I mean someday. You don't believe me now. You think I'm crazy. But you'll find out.

She turned her head as though someone had spoken, and when she saw no one behind her she shivered uncontrollably. Someone put a shawl about her shoulders. It was Otis Huse. He was still beside her. The magic act was over. The men were besieging Thorne, begging for an explanation of her tricks, but she escaped them all and fled to Richard, who laughingly barricaded her with his arms and announced that the show was over.

Judith said to the man at her side, "You have seen how clever she is. Do you need any further explanation of our witch?"

CHAPTER 20

Prayers were over. The fire was low, the backlog covered with ashes for the night. Candles brought from the kitchen waited in a row upon the table to light the way to bedrooms. In the corner near the alcove a feminine caucus was being held.

"You and the children can come into my room, Kate," Miss Ann was saying, "and Hugh can double up with Will. We'll put Alec with Jesse Moffat, and Jane and the baby can share Thorne's bed with Nancy Turner. That leaves the big bed down here for Cousin Lutie."

"There's still Lucius Goff and Otis Huse," said Kate.

"We'll put them in the downstairs bedroom."

A look passed between the Tomlinson daughters.

"Do you think they'll mind?" wondered Jane.

"If they do they'll have to sleep on a pallet in the kitchen," said her mother.

"That doesn't take care of Thorne," said Kate.

"She can sleep on the trundle, as she always does when there's company."

"She won't like it."

Jane murmured, "I feel guilty, taking her bed."

A voice came unexpectedly from across the room. "Thorne will sleep where she's told to sleep, whether she likes it or not."

The Tomlinson women turned with a start. They had not realized their talk could be overheard.

Judith was standing near the table, about to pick up her night candle. She had taken no part in the domestic discussion for the simple reason that she was not interested. But she turned now and sharply addressed Thorne.

"You will sleep in the trundle bed as Miss Ann says, and no acting the crybaby about it. Do you understand?"

Since Thorne had not complained, the reprimand seemed uncalled for.

Richard said, "There's no need to speak to her in that tone. Judith." He turned to his mother. "The trundle bed is too short for Thorne. Why can't one of the younger children take it?"

Miss Ann explained that the younger children were doubling up as it was.

Judith said, "Thorne will sleep in the trundle bed and we'll hear no more about it." She turned to Alec Mitchell. ''Will you draw the bed out, please?" She seemed to have taken charge of operations.

But Miss Ann was still, to her sons-in-law, the head of the house. Alec cast an inquiring glance in her direction and received a nod of assent.

A queer tension gripped Judith as she watched Alec draw the trundle from under the bed in the alcove and pull it out into the center of the room.

As she remembered it afterward, they were all standing in an irregular circle about the bed: Hugh Turner, Otis Huse, and Lucius at the right of the fireplace; Richard a few feet away near the piano; herself by the table where stood the night candles. Jesse Moffat, who had already picked up his candle, was near the hall door. Miss Ann and her daughters, With the children, formed a group near the alcove.

Judith saw Thorne, who had been standing near the hearth, move closer to Richard. Anger rose within her, followed by a queer nausea. She felt—as she had felt that other time when she heard the clock strike—as though the temperature of the room had suddenly dropped. A strange premonition of impending mischief gripped her. She told herself that this was imagination and looked about to see if others felt it too. Then suddenly, while she was looking at it, she saw Jesse Moffat's candle go out. One by one she watched the candles all over the room go out. The smell of smoking tallow was acrid in her nostrils.

All the people in the room were in shadow now. She could not see their faces, only indistinct shapes. The only light was the glow from the fireplace, which fell upon the trundle bed. This was the bed on which she had sat with Thorne while she listened to Abigail's dying gasps. She stared at it now as though it were a sentient thing that could remember and accuse.

While she watched with fearful fascination the bed began to move. It trembled convulsively in all its joints, like a palsied old man. Its agitation increased until it rattled like a wooden cart rolling over a corduroy road.

A voice rose thinly: "She's doing it, Richard! Make her stop!" Tone, cadence, pitch were like a reproduction of another voice, heard long ago when a cucumber cow was milked. Judith, listening, chilled. And then she realized it was her own voice she had heard. At the realization she sickened and closed her eyes. When she opened them the bed had stopped shaking. But she no longer saw a trundle bed. She saw a replica, in miniature, of the bed in the south room.

Richard started toward his wife, alarmed at the ghastly pallor of her face. The skirts of his coat almost brushed the bed. Judith cried, "Don't touch it! Stay where you are."

The bed shuddered and began shaking as before. Judith closed her eyes against the motion, which made her seasick. When she opened them the bed was still. It was again the trundle bed.

In the silence that followed there was no sound except her own heavy, half-strangled breathing.

She turned on Thorne, screaming in that voice which did not seem to be her own, "You did this, you little witch! This is another of your magic tricks. Light the candles, Richard. We'll see if she gets her way by frightening people out of their wits."

Richard said, "The candles were lighted some time ago."

Judith looked about the room. Incredibly, flame flared from every taper, including Jesse Moffat's. The shadows had receded; faces were again visible. And every face was turned toward her in curious wonder. She looked to her husband. He was regarding her anxiously.

"Are you ill, Judith?"

She could feel even' eye upon her, particularly Otis Huse's. She was conscious of the fascinated interest of the farm hand. But she saw only Thorne's white face, with dark eyes wide and watchful. She noted that from where the girl was standing she could not have touched the trundle bed.

Richard repeated his question: "Are you all right, Judith?"

"Quite all right, thank you."

There was a concerted sigh of relief from the onlookers. Miss Ann began collecting the children, marshaling them to bed.

Thorne asked, "Am I to sleep down here in the trundle bed?"

"No," said Richard. "Anyone can see the bed is too short for you. There's a couch in our room which will do for me. You can sleep with Judith."

His mother agreed. "Put the trundle back in the alcove. Alec."

Before Alec could obey, Judith astonished them all by countermanding Miss Ann's order.

"Leave the bed where it is. We might as well have a showdown now as later, Richard."

He said, "I don't know what you mean by showdown."

"Tliome's cleverness tonight has gone to her head. She doesn't want to sleep in the trundle, so she performs a sleight-of-hand trick, making the bed appear to—dance." Judith passed her hand across her eyes. She shrank from mentioning the weird metamorphosis she had seen. Now that it was past, she told herself it had been a trick of her own eyesight, caused by the movement of the bed. She appealed to the others for support. "You all saw the magic Thorne worked tonight. A dancing bed is no more remarkable than a burning match that disappears within a cloth without leaving a trace."

Curious, half-fearful glances passed among the people in the room. Half-audible murmurs and whispers circulated among them.

Richard said to Thorne, "Cricket, did you do anything to the bed?"

Thorne said, "No. I wasn't near it."

"That's true." Richard turned to Judith. "Thorne was at least six feet from the bed when yoti screamed. I know because you frightened her so, she grabbed hold of me."

"Then who played that trick with the bed?" demanded Judith.

"There's been no trick played with the bed. What are you talking about?"

Suddenly she knew sickeningly that he was going to deny having seen the thing which had frightened her.

"If you didn't see it, Richard, it was because you were looking elsewhere. It was perfectly visible, even if the candles did gutter down. The rest of you saw it, didn't you?" She looked about the room; sharply, at first, then frantically, as she saw blank denial in every face. "You know you saw it! You, Will—you, Jesse Moffat—Lucius—why do you all just stare at me, pretending you didn't see Thorne's trick of legerdemain? You were kinder to Abigail. You were quick to assure her that you had seen milk come from a cucumber cow."

No one answered her appeal. The men addressed returned her frantic gaze in silence that became so oppressive it was like shutting off the air to her lungs. She loosened the ribbon at her throat and looked about for a window to open, wondering why it was so hard to breathe. Her eyes bulged as though she were choking, and she breathed openmouthed like a fish, gasping for air.

Richard's voice seemed to come from a vast distance. "No use having hysterics, Judith. I'm putting the trundle bed away."

His brother Will came forward to assist him. Judith saw them whispering together as they pushed the trundle back under the bed in the alcove. She told herself that they were agreeing on some course of action to protect Thorne.

After that there was a slight rearrangement of sleeping accommodations. For when Richard said, ''There! That puts the trundle out of sight!" a wail arose from an unexpected quarter.

"If you think I'm going to sleep in the alcove with a piece of furniture Judith saw cuttin' up, you're crazy!"

Three hundred pounds of quavering terror faced him belligerently. Cousin Lutie, her mouth still full of the coconut cake for which she had made a surreptitious trip to the kitchen, looked so ludicrous that Richard began to laugh, and his laughter eased the tension.

"The furniture has not been cutting up. Cousin Lutie."

"Judith said it did. Personally, I'd take a schoolma'am's word against a farmer's any day."

"All right, if you're afraid to sleep down here, you can have our room. And Thorne can sleep with you. Judith and I will sleep in the alcove. Unless Judith is afraid."

Judith had recovered from her hysteria. Kate had brought smelling salts and made her lie down upon the couch. She sat up now, protesting that she was not afraid and never had been. She was merely annoyed at having tricks played on her. If Richard slept in the alcove, of course she would sleep there too. Whereupon the rest of the family took their candles and departed for rooms above, still laughing at Cousin Lutie. The fat woman's round face, smeared with fright and coconut icing, had restored to the Tomlinsons their forgotten sense of humor.

Richard showed Lucius and Otis Huse into the downstairs bedroom. As he set his candle on the mantelpiece he said casually, "Judith has not been well lately. I'm afraid her eyes are bothering her." And that was the only apology offered for his wife's unusual behavior.

Lucius was chagrined to find himself quartered with the lawyer. He had hoped for a chance to talk privately with Richard, and the presence of Huse made this impossible. But when he was alone with his uncongenial roommate he decided it might be as interesting to get the attorney's reaction to Judith's strange conduct as Richard's.

"Well, what did you make of it?" he asked chattily as he began taking off his boots.

Huse was looking about him with interest. This was the first time he had been in the room in which his cousin had died. He noted the outer door in the south wall, the window in the east—the window through which the alleged bricks had come. He examined this window with interest. It was closed, its pane intact.

Lucius, watching him, repeated his question: ''What do you think Judith Tomlinson saw tonight?"

The lawyer frowned thoughtfully. "I'm more interested in what she sees when she claims bricks are thrown through that window, only to disappear."

"What do you mean?" asked Lucius.

Huse indicated the angle at which the window set to the outer door. "Bricks thrown through the window could pass straight through the door if it was standing open."

"Oh no." On this point Lucius was positive. "The bricks always land on the floor. They make a loud thud when they fall."

"Has anyone ever heard them fall except Judith Tomlinson?"

"Not that I know of."

The lawyer shrugged. "And no one else has seen them," he said dryly.

His attitude nettled Lucius. "Why should you doubt the

woman's word? Do you think she's making this up out of whole cloth?"

"Do you consider her a creditable witness," countered Huse, "after the way she behaved tonight?"

"I think her behavior tonight proves that something is frightening her to death," said Lucius stoutly.

''Are you suggesting," said Huse coldly, "that she saw something which was not visible to anyone else?"

"Did you see anything?" retorted Lucius.

They undressed in chill silence, literally, for the fireless room was cold. Huse snuffed the candle; and Lucius, already submerged beneath the bedcovers, was surprised to find a misty light coming from the east window. The skies had cleared. There was a late-rising moon.

He mumbled, "Pull the shade, will you? Bad luck sleeping in the moonlight."

With a disdainful sniff for the other man's superstition, Huse drew the blind to its full length, then climbed into bed. Within a matter of seconds both men were asleep.

They awakened simultaneously, with a crashing sound in their ears and a streaming light in their eyes.

"Did you hear "

"What the devil "

Both men were sitting erect, rigid with cold and some nameless alarm. It was like waking from nightmare: still gripped with fear, but unable to recall its origin.

Huse muttered, "What was it?"

"Sssh!" whispered Lucius. "There's something in this room."

They waited, listening, their eyes strained to pierce the black shadows that lay on either side of the bed. The moon focused a spotlight on the counterpane.

"I don't see anything," said Huse.

"Did you hear that noise?"

"Yes. That's what woke me."

"Damn that moonhght! It blnds me."

"Look! The window bhnd. That's what made the noise."

The dark green bhnd, which Huse had so carefully lowered, had fallen. Moonlight streamed through the unshaded window.

With a snort of absurd relief Huse climbed out of bed and found the fallen window blind on the floor. It had rolled itself neatly back upon its roller as it fell.

"Here's what made the noise," he explained. "The spring in the roller suddenly released, and the blind flew up with such force that it jerked the roller off the hook. Simple, eh? I suppose you thought it was a ghost."

Lucius withheld comment. He pulled the covers over his head again, while Huse replaced the roller on its fixtures, lowered the shade to exclude the moonlight, and crawled back into bed.

"One of the hooks was bent. I straightened it. It won't happen again, I'll warrant." And turning on his side, the lawyer was soon asleep.

But Lucius could not sleep. One of those wakeful spells that sometimes beset the healthiest sleeper descended upon him. He turned on his left side, he turned on his right; he sprawled on his stomach, he flopped on his back; but he could not regain the sound slumber he had lost.

He threw off one of the many quilts because he was too warm. Then he felt a chill and pulled it back. He seemed to be smothering. He began to fear he was having a heart attack. Perhaps if he turned over—Dr. Caxton had said that if the left arm pressed against the heart . . .

He lay on his back, gasping for air, trying to summon courage to get up and raise a window. The room was suddenly stifling. But he was afraid to leave his bed. And he was loath to call Huse, who had already been up once.

The smothering sensation was in his throat now. Some-

thing was too tight about his neck. He tore frantically at the collar of his borrowed nightshirt.

The collar was not even buttoned. It was open at the throat.

He tried desperately to call his companion. He could make no sound. He was strangling—choking to death—unable to cry for help.

When the crash came the second time it did not even startle him. He was almost gone. But he knew, in his semiconscious state, that the window blind had fallen again and that somehow it had brought relief. Moonlight streamed through the pane once more, and though the window was closed fresh air seemed to blow through the room. Lucius took great gulps of it into his bursting lungs and found that he was able to breathe again. The room seemed full of sweet fresh air.

Otis Huse sat up in bed, muttering, "This is getting to be a habit." But he got up and restored the fallen blind. Half asleep, he crawled back under the covers and was immediately dead to the world. He had replaced the rolled shade on its fixtures, but he had neglected to pull it down.

The moon shone straight into Lucius's eyes. He was ashamed to ask Huse to get out of bed for the third time and, to his disgust, he lacked the nerve to do it himself. So he lay staring at the moonlit window, his body icy with sweat.

He tried to remember afterward whether he closed his eyes or took them from the window, but he was never sure. He could not have told how it came or when; but suddenly it was there: a hand pressed against the windowpane.

There was nothing dim or misty in its shape. It was as vividly outlined against the glass as though the moon were a powerful spotlight. It was a woman's hand, slender, long-fingered, and so white that its texture seemed luminous.

There was curious pathos in the way the hand was pressed against the pane, slightly cupped, as though shading a pair of eyes that were trying to peer into the room. Yet Lucius saw no face, no arm, no body; nothing beyond the window but inky shadow, except for the spot of moonhght illuminating the hand.

While he looked at it he felt a strange compassion for someone, or something, that almost made him weep. As long as this pity gripped him, he was not afraid. As long as he knew no fear, he kept his eyes upon the hand. How long this lasted, he did not know.

Then realization came, and with it fear. Suddenly he told himself that he was looking at a hand that had no arm, and terror swept him so that he cried out hoarsely,

Otis Huse sat up in bed.

Lucius pointed to the window. The hand was gone.

He did not tell Huse what he had seen. He could not. He was still in the grip of a nightmare that tied his tongue. He told himself that in the morning he would tell the lawyer of his experience and let him question it if he dared. But he could not speak of it tonight.

So when Huse climbed out of bed for the third time and drew the blind, shutting out the disturbing moonlight, Lucius turned on his side and went quickly, soundly, to sleep, like a man drugged. He did not waken until voices and footsteps beyond the hall door warned that it was morning and the rest of the household was astir.

Huse was already out of bed. The two men dressed in curious silence. Perhaps it was only the natural glumness of early morning. But for some reason Lucius's resolve to relate his nocturnal experience began to dissipate with daylight. He was certain the lawyer would not believe him; Huse would discredit the whole episode as a nightmare. The thing should have been told at the moment, before any doubts—even his own—had time to germinate. Already Lucius was beginning to wonder if he had been the victim of an exceedingly realistic dream.

And then an odd thing happened. Huse, in dressing, dropped a collar button. It rolled through a crack under the closet door. The walls of this closet were unfinished, and rough two-by-fours left a space of several inches where floor and wall failed to meet. Huse cursed lustily when he saw where the button had gone.

"Damn the luck! It's rolled down that hole. Lend a hand, will you? Your fist is smaller than mine."

Lucius's long slim hand slipped easily under the floor boards and retrieved the missing button; likewise a bundle of rags stuffed between the sleeper and the floor.

"Lucky those rags were there. They kept your button from dropping through to the cellar."

Huse did not answer. He was regarding with queer interest the handful of rags, which were not rags at all, but a homemade doll with a velvet ribbon tied round its neck so tight that its head lolled foolishly to one side.

When Lucius saw the doll his face paled.

"Have you ever seen this before?" asked the lawyer.

Lucius nodded. He had an uncomfortable sensation of being on the witness stand.

"This is the doll my cousin feared, isn't it?"

There was no doubt it was the same doll. Lucius remembered it only too well. He reluctantly admitted as much.

"I wonder how it got under the floor of that closet," said Huse.

"Maybe it fell down there by accident."

"It couldn't have fallen through a crack that narrow." The implication was obvious. The doll had been hidden under the floor.

Sharply Lucius recalled his weird experience of the night. He debated whether or not to tell the lawyer. Desire to prove a point overrode prudence. Briefly he told of the hand he had seen at the window and the peculiar suggestion it carried of eyes peering into the room. Both men glanced at the window from which the bhnd had fallen three times. It was on a direct line with the spot where the doll was found.

For once Huse had no ready argument to sustain his own skepticism. He recalled what the doctor had told him about his cousin's death: that she had choked to death from no apparent cause. All that he had seen in this house, all that he had heard of it suddenly assumed a sinister significance.

"Suppose, for the sake of conjecture—mind, I don't claim to believe any such thing—but suppose your experience last night was something more than nightmare; do you think it was in any way connected with the secret of this doll's hiding place?"

"I do," said Lucius.

"That means you believe this doll was responsible for my cousin's death," said the lawyer.

But Lucius was not prepared to go that far. "Oh no. How could it be?"

"Knowing poor Abigail's fear of this thing," said Huse harshly, "and her nervous state at the time, I should say the sight of this doll with a strangling cord around its neck would have been sufficient to frighten her to death."

Lucius, now thoroughly alarmed, said hastily that he did not think anything of the kind and suggested that they put the doll back where they had found it. But this Huse refused to do.

"In that case, then, we'll show it to Richard," said Lucius, and on this point they finally compromised.

They talked to Richard after breakfast, behind closed doors in the bedchamber, for Lucius made it clear that what they had to tell was for his ears alone. Richard listened calmly to the account of the falling window blind; even Lucius's nocturnal experience failed to move him. But when Huse took up the narrative and told of the rolling collar button and what was found beneath the closet floor, every trace of color drained from Richard's face. There was no question of the shock he received when Thorne's doll was laid before him.

He regarded it for a long moment in silence. Then he said, "Thank you, gentlemen, for coming with this to me. I should have destroyed it long ago. I'd forgotten it was there."

''You mean—you knew about it?" The lawyer's sharp query betrayed collapse of a rapidly building case.

Richard said coolly, "I put it there myself."

For a second the two lifelong antagonists faced each other in open hostility. Lucius, the onlooker, thought, "Richard is lying and Huse knows it."

"My late wife had a morbid fear of this doll," Richard explained. "So I hid it where she could not possibly find it."

"In her own room?" said Huse skeptically.

"Where no one could find it," said Richard. "There are children in this house. The doll was their plaything. The one place they were never allowed to play was in their mother's room." He said children. Both men noted that he pointedly referred to his own small boys, ignoring the girl who had made the doll.

"As for your experience last night, Lucius, I ask you please not to spread that tale around the country. There is nothing extraordinary about a falling window shade. And your dream of suffocation is not remarkable, considering that from boyhood you've suffered from nightmare. I've slept with you too often to be fooled by that." Richard smiled at his friend good-humoredly, but a spot of color burned now in each cheek.

The lawyer said, "Do you consider that choking string around the doll's neck part of your friend's nightmare?"

Richard's eyes blazed. At last he made no effort to hide his feeling toward this uninvited guest.

"I've tried to treat you courteously, Otis Huse, because of your relationship to my children. I don't know what you came here to find, and I'm neither interested nor alarmed. But I do ask you to leave my house because I don't like your libelous insinuations."

Perhaps it was the unlooked-for explosion, perhaps it was the word "libel," which brought the lawyer to realization that he had nothing but dreams and toys on which to found his vague suspicions. He was much too astute to risk a suit for damages, so he took his departure forthwith, leaving his luckless companion to get back to town the best way he could.

"Don't worry, Richard. Otis won't do anything. He's no fool, even if he is mean as gar broth." Lucius tried to reassure his friend when the other man had gone. "Suppose he did find Thorne's doll with a string choking it. No court in the world would call it..." And then at sight of Richard's face he stopped, appalled at his own words.

"I mean—the doll had nothing to do with Abigail's..." He floundered helplessly and gave up. Muttering something about business in Woodridge, he asked if he might have the loan of a horse.

CHAPTER 21

From an upstairs window Judith watched Otis Huse drive away and knew that her hope in that quarter had failed. He had spent a night at Timberley; he had witnessed her discomfiture, but he had not come to her support. If this shrewd, not disinterested attorney had failed to see anything on which to base an accusation of Thorne, there was nothing left to Judith but her fear.

She wondered what the three men had talked about behind the closed door of the room downstairs. All night long she had tormented herself with the fear of what might be discovered by the two who were sleeping there. Once, unable to close her eyes, she had stolen from the bed in the alcove and slipped outdoors, in wrapper and nightgown, to peer through the window of the adjacent room. With her hand pressed to the moonlit pane, shielding her eyes from the eerie radiance, she had been able to satisfy herself that both men were abed and the closet door fast shut. She had crept back into the house and her own bed without waking her husband and fallen at last into slumber.

But now the caucus following breakfast had revived last night's fear. With the men gone she was free to question Richard, but she was afraid she might betray herself. She could no longer trust her tongue to speak her mind's intention.

The feeling of someone close beside her was with her constantly now, prompting her every utterance, possessing her very soul. It was not of her own volition that she quarreled with Richard. She had listened, helpless, last night to her own tirade as it poured from her mouth upon Thorne, knowing that with every word she was driving her lover from her. He had slept by her side in the alcove, in a bed that was strange and comfortless, and not once had he touched or spoken to her. Did he really believe she was lying about the thing she had seen? Or did he think she was losing her mind?

This was the beginning of a significant change in Judith. As winter came on she spent more and more time in her room. She made it bright and cheerful, and there was always a fire to attract visitors, so that gradually it became a family habit to sit in Judith's room instead of the room downstairs. Ann said one day to her daughter Kate, "We sit with Judith now almost as much as we used to sit with Abigail," and then, as the words sank in, mother and daughter exchanged a troubled look.

Judith's most frequent visitor was, surprisingly, young Will. The lad was obliged to pass her door in order to reach his own room, and she always called some pleasant greeting to him. At first he responded sulkily and went on by; then he took to lingering in the doorway; finally he came in and sat down.

He never had much to say, but he seemed flattered that Judith should enjoy talking to him. The talk always turned subtly upon himself. What was he doing these winter days when there was so little work upon the farm? Whom did he see when he went to Woodridge? Why hadn't he attended the housewarming at Tatum's the other night? Because he had no girl to take? Fie! There must be dozens of girls in the neighborhood to choose from.

Little by little the taciturn youth revealed himself to this clever sister-in-law as he had never revealed himself to mother or sisters. And Judith discovered a curious thing about young Will. He was jealous of his older brother. That he was unconscious of this jealousy was as evident as that it existed. But it had been the mainspring of his industry on the farm, just as it had been the stimulus for his adolescent wild oats. Because Richard had been born with that charm which pleases without effort, it had been necessary for young Will to prove himself the better farmer and to boast of his prowess with women,