A BOYCOTTED HOUSEHOLD Thursday evening found me at the Lessing's bungalow. Mrs. Lessing was in evidence this time, in a soft black gown that accentuated the pallor of her face. The evening did not correct my first impressions of her. She shook hands limply, contributed a few remarks about the weather, and then subsided on the couch in silence. Dinner was laid on a small round table near the window, and Mary Lessing came in from the kitchen with uprolled sleeves and a big apron tied about her. "We do our own chores here, Doctor Haverill," she said. "Do you want to make yourself useful?" I rose promptly. Lessing had not yet appeared and my tête-à-tête with his wife was not exhilarating. I followed her out into the kitchen, where she gave me a can-opener and a box of sardines. "Turn those out for me, please. And if you have any hygienic aversion to canned goods, smother it. We live on them here." "You find it far from the village?" She smiled, quizzically. "A good way. Besides, the tradespeople here aren't exactly genial. So we subsist on boxes from the city. It gives you all the real pleasure of a desert island without the risks. Put them on that plate, will you? You see, by the time the box arrives and gets hauled up from the station we've generally forgotten what we ordered, so there's all the excitement of discovery as well. This time it was olives. Do you realize the joy of unexpected olives in the wilderness?" "I'm going to." "That's the right spirit! Living in the country teaches one a becoming humility. There are more things to open. Perhaps it was a mistake to ask you out here, but in any case I could hardly have palmed off these peaches as grown in our own garden, because we haven't got one." She was standing at the table, drying crisp salad on a white cloth. The position showed me only her profile, with a little wave of bronze hair escaping near one ear. "Do you think gardening is worth the trouble?" "When things like this grow in every department store? Perhaps not. Good heavens, Doctor Haverhill, but you must wash that can-opener! Give it to me!" I gazed at the jagged gash already achieved in the peach-can. "Don't tell anyone and they won't taste it!" "I thought bachelors knew how to do everything." "Sardines and peaches go excellently together," I maintained. "They call it salade de fruits poissonnés." Lessing lounged in. "I admire the way Mary sets you to work," he said. "She has a talent for being industrious by proxy. Here----" He pulled a parcel out of his pocket "I've brought your cheese, but I won't answer for the state of it." Miss Lessing cast a quick glance at me. "Where----?" "Not at Johnson's. I don't know if my sister has explained to you, Doctor Haverhill, that we are a boycotted household? We find it quite amusing. It leads to a practice of expedience which is excellent training for the young. Mary has learned to make quite creditable bread already." "Out of the sawdust they pack the canned goods in," put in his sister promptly. "Carry that dish in without spilling it, Dick, and don't talk nonsense!" We sat down to one of the most cheerful meals four young people have ever enjoyed. I would except Mrs. Lessing, but that even her limp and monosyllabic presence failed to dampen our spirits. Afterwards Lessing made Turkish coffee over a spirit lamp while the two girls cleared the table, refusing my assistance high-handedly. I moved about the room in the familiarity which our informal meal had fostered, looking at the knick-knacks, the row of books on the shelves. They were a pretty varied collection, poetry, some modern French scientific books and novels, and one of the most complete collections of detective literature I have ever encountered, side by side with a few text-books on chemistry and some volumes on occultism and black magic, some familiar to me by title, others unknown. There was a monthly magazine lying near which I recognized as occupying itself largely with the subject of psychic phenomena, and turning it over I noticed Lessing's name in the index. "You write?" I asked. "Once in a blue moon!" He looked up from a critical stage in his coffee-making. "Does that sort of thing interest you?" "Indifferently--if it happens to be genuine." "There's so little genuine." He withdrew the coffee deftly, blowing out the lamp, and stood the little copper pot aside. "That's the worst of it. One endures hours of boredom for no result." "You belong to the P.R.S.?" "A most respectable and unexciting body." He smiled. "I would give in my demission, only they afford me a patient hearing from time to time. Besides, it gives me the opportunity of wrangling with someone, and contention is the spice of life, as I was saying. It was with that truism that I strove to console Lennox, when I bored him to extinction." Involuntarily my ears pricked. "Was that often?" "No, I can't say the boredom predominated, in the long run." He surveyed his coffee with the air of an artist, his boyish head on one side. "Where are those cups, Mary?" "Your system of boredom seemed to have a remarkable effect on Lennox, anyway," slipped from me involuntarily. Lessing laughed. "Oh, that was when the boredom ended! He stood it nobly to a point." He turned toward me. "Would you like to see what frightened Lennox, sometime?" Before I could answer Mary Lessing came in with the coffee-cups, and the subject was dropped. It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, my departure hastened by a suspicion that Mrs. Lessing had glanced several times of purpose at the clock. They all came out on the porch to say good night, and at the last moment Lessing added: "I'll walk down the hill with you." "I've got my bicycle," I said quickly, as Miss Lessing looked up. "There's no need to bring you out." "Oh, it'll do me good!" It was a still, sultry night, with a humidity in the air that had arisen since nightfall. We walked leisurely, smoking, as far as the crossroad at the top of Dutchman's Hill. The hollow below was alive with fireflies, gleaming and vanishing alternately in the soft dusk. There should be a moon, but within the past hour premonitory rainclouds had gathered, blotting it out. Lessing glanced at the sky. "How long will it take you to get back?" "Ten minutes, more or less. It won't rain till I get there." I scratched a match, stooping toward my bicycle lantern. "Is it necessary to light that?" he asked. "Why not? There's a bad bit of road at the bottom there." "I find the glare of a lamp like that always makes it worse. What is it, acetylene?" He bent over the lantern to examine it, and in the pause the match burned down and went out. I felt for the box again in my pocket, and as I did so Lessing let go his hold on the bicycle. The machine slipped by its weight, and reaching quickly to catch it I heard the unmistakable sound of escaping air. "Now you've done it!" cried Lessing boyishly. "Damn!" I groped for the rear tire. It was flat. "Here's a cheerful business. How the dickens----" Lessing laughed. "We'll have to walk it now! Never mind. I know the road." "I'm not going to bring you all that way," I said. "I shall be all right." "Nonsense! I like a walk before I turn in." He took hold of the bicycle on one side, I on the other, and together we set off to walk down the hill. There is an exhilaration in walking through woods at night, even tempered by the necessity of pushing a heavy motor-cycle before you, and my brief annoyance at the accident rapidly vanished. Lessing was boyishly high-spirited; between us we made a fairly rowdy trip of it. We had just finished the ascent of the other side of the hollow when he laid a sudden hand on my arm. "Did you hear anything?" "No. Why?" I thought he was still joking, but his cloak of nonsense had dropped from him abruptly. He pulled me to the side of the road. "Listen!" There seemed nothing to listen for. I waited, rather impatiently. Lessing threw back his head, scanning the line of the trees that shut us in. "There!" It was still in my mind that he was trying to play some game on me. "It's nothing but a bird," I said. "Bird? You heard nothing else?" "No." "Come on," Lessing said. He seemed abruptly sobered, and I fancied he was at pains to quicken our pace over the remaining stretch of road. When we sighted the glimmer of the orchard palings I pulled up. "Come on into the house and have a drink," I said. "No, thanks. I must get back. By the way, do you carry a revolver?" "What on earth for?" "I only wondered. I should advise you to, around here." His hand slipped down to his pocket, and I heard a soft click. "What are you going to do?" "Have a pot at the birds, going back." He smiled. "Good night. Look in sometime during the week." And he went off without further delay, whistling softly.