He gazed at her for a moment, at the shadows like
pools of ink poured into the caverns of her eyes, at
a glint of teeth no whiter than the rest, at the dark
plait of her hair lying sinuously over the pillow.
Then he went to the door:

"Mrs. Caley," he pronounced. The woman appeared
in the doorway from the kitchen. "Mrs.
Caley," he repeated, "Lettice is dead."

She started forward with a convulsive gasp, and
he turned aside and walked heavily out onto the
porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into
the darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream
village, the stars like clusters of silver grapes
on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills
throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself
whispered in a pervasive monotone. The first
George Gordon MacKimmon, resting on the porch
of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard
the whippoorwills and the stream. Gordon's father
had heard them just as he, the present Makimmon,
heard them sounding in the night. But no
other Makimmon would ever listen to the persistent
birds, the eternal whisper of the water, because he,
the last, had killed his wife... he had killed
their child.

He trod down the creaking steps to the soft, fragrant
sod, and made his way to where a thread of
light outlined the stable door. Sim was seated on

[[277]]

p276 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p277w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p278

v?