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The high-pitched note, the elfin call vibrated off into faintness. And now, again, she seemed to be standing in mists by a seashore, holding a hollow shell, with a curve in its pipe, to her ear.

There was a throbbing of the air about her, a low reverberation, swelling into a soft intoning, like the murmur of sad sea waves.

“Goodness! Now—now the wood is a ‘roaring buckie’, as Andrew, our Scotch chauffeur, would call a big crooning shell that he’d pick up for me on the seashore. I wish Andrew were here. If only Pemrose was here!”

She had a momentary spasm of faint-heartedness—of being once more the timid Una, timid to weakness in all but the strength of her imagination. She turned to flee—to beat a retreat to the garden, to her fanciful flower clock.

But that hum was too alluring. A wood that, at daybreak, was a roaring buckie was too persuasive—appealing to every fancy she had.

She began to feel like the ghost of some poor little queer fish that had crept back into the clammy shell it once inhabited.