“All right.  I’ll come to the party.  If the rest of you can stand it, I can!”

“It ’ll do you good,” she returned, rustling into the hall.  “Now take a nap, and I’ll send one o’ the help to wake you in time for you to get dressed up before dinner.  You go to sleep right away, now, Bibbs!”

Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed.  Something she had said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over interminably.  “His plans for you—­his plans for you—­his plans for you—­his plans for you—­” And then, taking the place of “his plans for you,” after what seemed a long, long while, her flurried voice came back to him insistently, seeming to whisper in his ear:  “He loves his chuldern—­he loves his chuldern—­he loves his chuldern”—­ “you’ll find he’s always right—­you’ll find he’s always right—­” Until at last, as he drifted into the state of half-dreams and distorted realities, the voice seemed to murmur from beyond a great black wing that came out of the wall and stretched over his bed—­it was a black wing within the room, and at the same time it was a black cloud crossing the sky, bridging the whole earth from pole to pole.  It was a cloud of black smoke, and out of the heart of it came a flurried voice whispering over and over, “His plans for you—­his plans for you—­his plans for you—­” And then there was nothing.

He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly—­as one might have a care against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic—­and, getting to his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade so that it flew up, letting in a pale sunset.

He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith’s grandiose phrase came to mind, “the old Vertrees country mansion.”  It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans’ by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola.  Paint had been spared for a long time, and no one could have put a name to the color of it, but in spite of that the place had no look of being out at heel, and the sward was as neatly trimmed as the Sheridans’ own.

The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs’s window—­for this wing of the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot—­and, directly opposite the window, the Vertreeses’ lawn had been graded so as to make a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic “summer-house.”  It was almost on a level with Bibbs’s window and not thirty feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder.  Probably the “summer-house” was pleasant and pretty in summer.  It had the look of a place wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls and “housekeeping,” or where a lovely old lady might come to read something dull on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was desolate, the color of dust, and hung with haggard vines which had lost their leaves.