Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SHADOWS OF FEAE TRYING to write consecutively of the events of my first few weeks at Dune House, I find myself baffled. There were no events, to be strictly truthful. The every-day tasks of teaching and playing with the children; of first listening to, then trying to avoid Miss Drusilla's fatuous and tiresome ramblings, and reading the books I had brought down with me, can hardly come under that head. As to the mystery which I felt underlying everything, that knowledge of something wrong which I had sensed since the first night of my arrival, it refused to come out into the open with any one happening, but skulked behind every word and every action with maddening vagueness. After that one passage of words between us, Miss Haldayne raised no objection to my taking the children for a run on the beach each day. And though the sight of her, always half concealed behind the hangings of the bay-window when I did so, gnawed irritatingly at mynerves, I did not appear to notice; nor did I allow it to turn me from my purpose. For a long time I could not classify the vague emotion which appeared to underlie the actions of the three adults. At the quiet meals, broken only by flabby Miss Drusilla's rambling monologues or Miss Haldayne's curt orders to Hoang, I tried to analyze it. Relations between the two sisters, it was easy to see, were strained; in fact, they had reached the stage of actual dislike, garrulous and spiteful on Miss Drusilla's part, contemptuous on Miss Haldayne's. One felt it as an almost tangible undercurrent. Though obviously afraid of her sister, Miss Drusilla took the delight of a mischievous child in irritating her with trifles,— gnat stings which the older woman brushed impatiently away, pausing to take a determined slap at them only when pla...