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a touch of awe at herself.
    ‘What have you being doing?’
    ‘Reading a letter, only.’ Jane hesitated, put up a hand and glanced at it, as though wondering whether it should or should not have sealed her mouth. But she was glad to have spoken. ‘One of some letters,’ she said, beginning to smile.
    ‘What, then the post’s come? What have they done with mine?’
    ‘Not the post. No, these came out of a trunk.’ Before more could follow, Jane with a few long steps had gone out, shutting the door behind her.

2

    Jane, the evening before, had come home alone. The Fête when darkness began to fall reached its conclusion in outdoor dancing, on the lawn of the castle which had been the scene all day—she like the other girls had stayed on; though not, like Kathie, up to the end. She left on an impulse. Music followed her over the empty country as she bicycled home through the lanes between there and Montefort; dust wraithlike rose from under her wheels. Honeysuckle sweetened the deepening hedges, from beyond which breathed distances cool with hay. The land had not yet composed itself quite to sleep, for light was not gone and might never go from the sky. The air through which she was swiftly  passing was mauve, and tense with suspended dew: her own beautiful restlessness was everywhere.
    From somewhere out behind Montefort, she at one time imagined she heard a call—she unchained the gates and rode up the avenue. The house, nothing as she approached it but a black outline, was deserted—doors and windows open, but not a lamp lit. Neither glad nor sorry but mystified, and still with that inexplicable feeling of being summoned, she looked into all the rooms—remains of supper were on a table: having come in, had the others gone out again? She scarcely wondered. For her the house was great with something: she had been sent for, and in haste. Why? Only attics now remained to be searched; and how could they (she reflected, for she was practical) show anything? She remembered at least a hat, not unlike Lady Latterly’s of this afternoon, left for years up there to hang on a broken harp. She lighted a candle and went to look.
    Of the stuffed, stuffy attics baking under the roof, only one was inhabited—by Kathie. They were loftlike, with here a pane let into the slates, there a floor-low window baulked by the front parapet. The flame of Jane’s candle consumed age in the air; toppling, the wreckage left by the past oppressed her—so much had been stacked up and left to rot; everything was derelict, done for, done with. Out of the dark projected cobwebby antlers or the broken splendid legs of a chair: shocking was it to her that there should be so much ignominy, perhaps infamy. She took the hat quickly, knocking a twang from the harp, and turned to go—she half thought a bat stirred in the rafters. But no, no sound, nothing more at all of that crepitation of opening leathery wings—there was a stir, but within herself. Her halted shadow lay on a trunk. She planted the candle on the floor, knelt down and set about shifting albums, stacks of them, from the top. She unbuckled straps, put the lid back and began to draw out the inexhaustible muslin of the dress—out of it, having been wedged in somewhere, tumbled the packet of letters. They fell at her feet, having found her rather than she them.

    The family knew no more than that Jane had come back and gone to bed—they supposed, tired. The homecoming rattle of her bicycle along the ruts of the avenue had been heard by Fred and Antonia, out strolling: they had glanced at one another and turned back, but nowhere was there a sign of her indoors. Lilia had, all the time, been lying silently in the dark on a sofa under a window when Jane passed through the drawing-room—in at one door, out again at the other. They all had been to the Fête, and a backwash from it still agitated their tempers and nerves—in the house itself residual pleasure-seeking ghosts had been set