The smoker was full of these eidolons and of others which came and went with constant vicissitude.  But what was of a greater weirdness than seeing them within it was seeing them without in that reflection of the interior which travelled with it through the summer night, and repeated it, now dimly, now brilliantly, in every detail.  Alford sat in a daze, with a smile which he was aware of, fixed and stiff as if in plaster, on his face, and with his gaze bent on this or that eidolon, and then on all of them together.  He was not so much afraid of them as of being noticed by the other passengers in the smoker, to whom he knew he might look very queer.  He said to himself that he was making the whole thing, but the very subjectivity was what filled him with a deep and hopeless dread.  At last the train ceased its long leaping through the dark, and with its coming to a stand the whole illusion vanished.  He heard a gay voice which he knew bidding some one good-bye who was getting into the car just back of the smoker, and as he descended to the platform he almost walked into the arms of Mrs. Yarrow.

“Why, Mr. Alford!  We had given you up.  We thought you wouldn’t come back till to-morrow—­or perhaps ever.  What in the world will you do for supper?  The kitchen fires were out ages ago!”

In the light of the station electrics she beamed upon him, and he felt glad at heart, as if he had been saved from something, a mortal danger or a threatened shame.  But he could not speak at once; his teeth closed with tetanic force upon each other.  Later, as they walked to the hotel, through the warm, soft night in which the south wind was roaming the starless heavens for rain, he found his voice, and although he felt that he was speaking unnaturally, he made out to answer the lively questions with which she pelted him too thickly to expect them to be answered severally.  She told him all the news of the day, and when she began on yesterday’s news she checked herself with a laugh and said she had forgotten that he had only been gone since morning.  “But now,” she said, “you see how you’ve been missed—­how any man must be missed in a hotel full of women.”

She took charge of him when they got to the house, and said if he would go boldly into the dining-room, where they detected, as they approached, one lamp scantly shining from the else darkened windows, she would beard the lioness in her den, by which she meant the cook in the kitchen, and see what she could get him for supper.  Apparently she could get nothing warm, for when a reluctant waitress appeared it was with such a chilly refection on her tray that Alford, though he was not very hungry, returned from interrogating the obscurity for eidolons, and shivered at it.  At the same time the swing-door of the long, dim room opened to admit a gush of the outer radiance on which Mrs. Yarrow drifted in with a chafing-dish in one hand and a tea-basket in the other.  She floated tiltingly towards him like, he thought, a pretty little ship, and sent a cheery hail before.