The mist came chill against her face, her breast, her bare arms. It pressed against her eyes like a bandage. Mary Hamilton’s lament came wailing through her mind: “They’ll tie a bandage roon ma een and no let me see to dee.” Horrible! That was what it had been like on the night when the ship went down-when Giles went down. A shudder went over her from head to foot. She wrenched away from the thought and sprang up. How many thousands of times had she said, “I won’t look back-I won’t remember.” If you keep the door shut upon the past, it can’t get at you. It’s gone, it’s dead, it’s over. No one can make you live it again except yourself-that traitor self which creeps out to unbar the bolts and let the enemy past creep in upon you again. She would have no traitors in her citadel. She must look to her bars and wait until the enemy tired and fell away.

She got into bed and lay down. The stillness of the night came nearer. Strange to think of this big house and all the people in it, and no sound, not so much as a breath, to show that it was inhabited.

Perhaps it wasn’t. When we are asleep, where are we? Not in the place where our bodies lie without sight or sense. Where had she been herself before she waked? She had walked with Giles-

The barred door was opening again. She thrust it to. “Don’t think about yourself. You mustn’t! Do you hear-you mustn’t! Think about all the other people in the house-not about yourself or Giles-Giles-”

The house-the people-

Vandeleur House-four stories and a basement set in what had once been a field bordered by a lane when Putney was a village in the days before London swallowed it up. A big square house, shorn now of most of its grounds and turned into flats. Vandeleur had lived and painted there-old Joseph Vandeleur who had been called the English Winterhalter.