turn to glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a
shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face;
and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in
loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering
down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a
stranger seeking his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her
but a blurred impression of slightness and grayness, with
something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure
or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash
down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for
the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional
clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to
follow him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the
attic landing she paused again for a less definite reason,
leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the
silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths below. She lingered
there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a
door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow
flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and
after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she
quickly crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone,
vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.