“Not till long, long afterward.”

“But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t its signalement been handed down in the family?  How has it managed to preserve its incognito?”

Alida could only shake her head.  “Don’t ask me.  But it has.”

“And then suddenly—­” Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of divination—­“suddenly, long afterward, one says to one’s self, ’That was it?’”

She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida’s clear pupils.  “I suppose so.  One just has to wait.”

“Oh, hang waiting!” Ned broke in.  “Life’s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect.  Can’t we do better than that, Mary?”

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had actually begun for them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude:  it was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it.  They had never for a moment meant their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities.  She had her vision of painting and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the production of his long-planned book on the “Economic Basis of Culture”; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.  But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island—­a nest of counties, as they put it—­that for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so far:  that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.

“It’s that,” Ned had once enthusiastically explained, “that gives such depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts.  They’ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful.”