The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng:  the old gray house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past.  The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in its special sense—­the sense of having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life.  The life had probably not been of the most vivid order:  for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.  Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs.  She had noticed of late that he preferred to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning’s work.  Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been there in his engineering days.  Then he had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of “worry” had never branded his brow.  Yet the few pages he had so far read to her—­the introduction, and a synopsis of the opening chapter—­gave evidences of a firm possession of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with “business” and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible element of anxiety was eliminated.  Unless it were his health, then?  But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed.  It was only within a week that she had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a secret to keep from him!

The thought that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the dim, long room.

“Can it be the house?” she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets.  They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

“Why, of course—­the house is haunted!” she reflected.