BOOK FIRST
THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
CHAPTER I
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
"Ask Nancy Cornish!"
The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the smothering blackness of the torrid August night.
He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his. In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her what that was doing there—since her name was not Ann and he had never imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them, blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy forms of shadowy persons—he hoped if they were his other characters they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!—one of whom threateningly cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now, actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if he had!
He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was—a little red-headed girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his dreams?
She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for. Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she was not Nancy Cornish.