“Heavens! I didn’t know you were such a storyteller,” murmured Darnley, as he picked up his overcoat.

“Did the wind take you to its house?” panted Olwen, flushed and fidgeting now, as Christie buttoned round her a grey-blue jacket with a rabbit-fur collar and proceeded to smooth down her hair under a small, stiff Russian cap; “and did you like being taken away from everybody, Wolf?”

He made no answer to the child’s question. A deadly sadness had suddenly descended upon him; and through this sadness, as if through a screen of Mukalog’s most disastrous rain, he fancied he caught an odiously possessive look shot forth upon Christie’s bending figure out of the old man’s narrowed eyelids.⁠ ⁠…

A few minutes later, as the faded vehicle drove off, with Olwen’s thin little arm protruded from its side, like a white stalk out of a black bag, and he turned to Christie in the doorway to bid her good night, he found an expression upon her face that sent a queer shiver through his nerves.