The summer night was already chilly, and over the half-opened window the muslin curtains swelled and receded, receded and swelled, as if they were sails on an invisible sea. Crouching upon a low straight-backed nursery-chair⁠—the very chair, in fact, upon which her mother had sat to suckle her in her infancy⁠—Mattie sat with her hands clasped round her knees, watching the shadows of their three forms, thrown by the candlelight, waver and hover against the old-fashioned wallpaper.

Wolf began to detach himself, as the three of them sat there, from the pressure of the actual situation, from the awareness even of his own personality. He seemed to slip away, out of his human skin, out of that old Ramsgard house, out of the very confines of life itself. He had the sensation that he was outside life⁠—that he was outside death too; that he was floating in some airy region, where forms and shapes and sounds had been left behind⁠—had changed into something else .