saw a lamp gleaming in the lattice window of the nursery.  She did not sit down on the seat.  She had thought to do that and to listen.  But the mist had made the wood very wet, and she had left the rug in the house.  If she walked softly up and down the little path she would be sure to hear the hoofs of Harrington’s horse, the wheels of the dogcart directly the wanderers drove into the Green Court.  There they would get down, and would walk home through the Dark Entry.  She intended to call out to them when she heard their footsteps ringing on the old stones.  That would surprise them.  She tried to enjoy the thought of their surprise when they heard her voice coming out of the darkness.  How Robin would jump at the sound of mummy!

She stood just in front of the seat for two or three minutes, listening intently in the misty darkness.  She heard nothing except for a moment a rustling which sounded like a bird moving in ivy.  Then she began to walk softly up and down passing and repassing the seat.  When she came up to the seat for the fourth time in her walk, an ugly memory—­she knew not why—­rose in her mind like a weed in a pool; it was the memory of a story which she had long ago read and disliked.  She had read it, she remembered, in a railway train on a long journey.  She had had a book, something interesting and beautiful, with her, but she had finished it.  A passenger, who had got out of the carriage, had left behind him a paper-covered volume of short stories.  She had taken it up and had read the first story, which now, after an interval of years, recurred to her mind.

There was in the story a very commonplace business man, middle-aged, quite unromantic and heavy, the sort of man who does not know what “nerves” means, who thinks suggestion “damned nonsense,” and psychical research, occultism, and so forth, absurdities fit only to take up the time of “a pack of silly women.”  This worthy person lived in the suburbs of London in a semi-detached villa with a long piece of garden at the back.  On the other side of the fairly high garden wall was the garden of his next-door neighbor, another business man of the usual suburban type.  Both men were busy gardeners in their spare time.  Number one had conceived the happy idea of putting up a tea-house in the angle of the wall at the bottom of his lawn.  Number two, having heard of this achievement, and not wishing to be outdone, put up a very similar tea-house in the corresponding angle on his side of the wall.  The two tea-houses stood therefore back to back with nothing but the wall between them.  Now, one warm summer evening Mr. Jenkins-Smith—­Rosamund could remember his name, though she had not thought of him for years—­had been busy watering his flowers and mowing his lawn.  He had worked really hard, and when the evening began to close in he thought he would go into the tea-house and have a rest.  On each side of the curly-legged tea-table of unpolished wood stood a wicker arm-chair.  Into