appeared to Dunn a clean impossibility, and for a moment he almost
supposed he had been mistaken in thinking he recognized her voice.

But he knew he had not, that he had made no mistake, that it had
indeed been Ella he had seen dash away into the darkness on her
strange and terrible errand.

"Oh, my daughter," said Deede Dawson carelessly, noticing Dunn's
surprise. "Oh, yes, she's back--you didn't expect to see her this
morning. Well, Ella, Dunn's surprised to see you back so soon,
aren't you, Dunn?"

Dunn did not answer, for a kind of vertigo of horror had come upon
him, and for a moment all things revolved about him in a whirling
circle wherein the one fixed point was Ella's gentle lovely face
that sometimes, he thought, had a small round hole with blue edges
in the very centre of the forehead, above the nose.

It was her voice, clear and a little loud, that called him back to
himself.

"He's not well," she was saying. "He's going to faint."

"I'm all right," he muttered. "It was nothing, nothing, it's only
that I've had nothing to eat for so long."

"Oh, poor man!" exclaimed Ella.

"Come up to the house," Deede Dawson said.