The clock on the mantel-piece ticked steadily away in the silence.  The dog, with a brute recognition of the unsatisfactory nature of spiritual aspiration, descended to the care of his own affairs, and scratched for fleas which knew no other world than his hind-quarters.

“Go away, go away!  You mustn’t come in here!”

The shrill voice of Mrs. Thalassa broke the silence like a cracked bell, shattering her husband’s meditations, and causing the dog to spring to his feet.  Thalassa looked at her angrily.  She was making mysterious motions with her hands, as if expostulating with some phantom of her thoughts, muttering and shaking her head rapidly.  Her husband stared across in silence for a moment.

“By God! she doesn’t improve with age,” he growled; then, louder:  “What’s the matter with you?  What are you making that noise for?”

The question went unheeded.  To his astonishment she sprang to her feet with a kind of grotesque vivacity, and, darting over to the window, began gesticulating again with an angry persistency, as if to some one outside.

Thalassa left his seat and went to the window also.  His wife had ceased her gestures, and stood still listening and watching.  Thalassa pulled back the blind, and looked out.  The moor and rocks were draped in black, and the only sounds which reached him were the disconsolate wail of the wind and the savage break of the sea on the rocks below.  He looked at his wife.  She had started tossing her hands again at some spectral invisible thing in the shadowy night.  She was quite mad—­there could be no doubt of that.  He endeavoured to lead her back to her seat by the fireside, but she broke away from him with surprising strength, and again her voice rang out—­

“Go away ... go away!  You can’t come in.  I won’t let you in.  You’re a wicked girl, Miss Sisily, and I won’t let you in.  You killed your father, and you’d like to kill me, but I’ll keep you locked out.  Go away!” Her voice rose to a screech.

The blood rushed to Thalassa’s head as he listened to these words.  He understood quite suddenly—­this was not a demented raving.  Sisily had been there—­she had come back to him in her fear—­and she had been driven away.  He turned to his wife and caught her up in his great arms, shaking her violently, as one shakes a child.  The sight was terrible and absurd, but there was no one to witness it but the dog, who circled round and round in yelping excitement, as though the scene was enacted for his benefit alone.

“Has Miss Sisily been here?”

The question thundered out in the empty silence.  Mrs. Thalassa crouched like a preposterous hunched-up doll on the seat where her husband had flung her, looking up at him with stupid eyes, but not speaking.  He approached her again.

“Speak, woman, speak, or I’ll strangle you.”

She backed away, whimpering with fear.  “No, no, Jasper, leave me alone.”