Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror.  In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor—­leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton’s crouching corpse—­were three parallel lines of footprints—­light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman’s.  From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way.  Brewer, who had observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale.

“Look at that!” he cried, pointing with both hands at the nearest print of the woman’s right foot, where she had apparently stopped and stood.  “The middle toe is missing—­it was Gertrude!”

Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.

The Shell of Sense

BY OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR

     From Harper’s Magazine, December, 1908.  By permission of Harper and
     Brothers and Olivia Howard Dunbar.

It was intolerably unchanged, the dim, dark-toned room.  In an agony of recognition my glance ran from one to another of the comfortable, familiar things that my earthly life had been passed among.  Incredibly distant from it all as I essentially was.  I noted sharply that the very gaps that I myself had left in my bookshelves still stood unfilled; that the delicate fingers of the ferns that I had tended were still stretched futilely toward the light; that the soft agreeable chuckle of my own little clock, like some elderly woman with whom conversation has become automatic, was undiminished.

Unchanged—­or so it seemed at first.  But there were certain trivial differences that shortly smote me.  The windows were closed too tightly; for I had always kept the house very cool, although I had known that Theresa preferred warm rooms.  And my work-basket was in disorder; it was preposterous that so small a thing should hurt me so.  Then, for this was my first experience of the shadow-folded transition, the odd alteration of my emotions bewildered me.  For at one moment the place seemed so humanly familiar, so distinctly my own proper envelope, that for love of it I could have laid my cheek against the wall; while in the next I was miserably conscious of strange new shrillnesses.  How could they be endured—­and had I ever endured them?—­those harsh influences that I now perceived at the window; light and color so blinding that they obscured the form of the wind, tumult so discordant that one could scarcely hear the roses open in the garden below?