"My aunt will be right down, Mr Macintosh," said a very self-possessed filly; "in the meantime you'll just have to try and put up with me."

Big Mac tried to think of the the correct thing to say which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping with his supposed recuperation.

"I know how you'll be," his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this seaside retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and not speak to anypony, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I'll write some letters of introduction to all the ponies I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice."

Big Mac wondered whether Mrs Stableton, the mare he was presenting with one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.

"Do you know many of the ponies around here?" asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

"Nope," said Big Mac. He hesitated before continuing, not usually being a pony to communicate through long conversation. "My sister was staying here, at the cottage down the road, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here."

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the self-possessed young mare.

"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs Stableton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest that this house was been lived in by a stallion.

"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the filly; "that would be since your sister's time."

"Her tragedy?" asked Big Mac; somehow in this restful seaside spot tragedies seemed out of place.

"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large Prench window that opened on to a lawn.

"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Big Mac; "but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?"

"Out through that window, three years ago to this very day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day's fishing. They never came back. In sailing across the bay to their favourite fishing spot they were pulled out by a strong current. It had been that dreadful windy summer, you know, and stretches of water that were safe in other years changed suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it." Here the filly's voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly vulnerable. "Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in through that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening until dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his back, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window—"

She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Big Mac when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"Eyup," said Big Mac.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs Sableton briskly; "my husband and brothers will be home directly from fishing, and they always come in this way. They've been out for salmon in the bay today, so they'll no doubt make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you stallions, isn't it?"

She rattled on cheerfully about sailing and the scarcity of big fish, and the prospects for the weather in the winter. To Big Mac it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise," announced Big Mac, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of my diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.

"No?" said Mrs Stableton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention — but not to what Big Mac was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if they are dripping with sea water!"

Big Mac shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Big Mac swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried fishing rods, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "this day is going to be perfect..."

Big Mac grabbed wildly at his saddle and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly-noted stages in his headlong retreat. A pony pulling a cart along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid an imminent collision.

"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white coat, coming in through the window and depositing a bucket of the spoils from their fishing trip; "we had a good haul today. Say, who was that who bolted out as we came up?"

"A most extraordinary man, a Mr Macintosh," said Mrs Stableton; "could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of goodbye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."

"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere north of Ghastly Gorge by a pack of diamond dogs, and had to spend the night in a crypt with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just outside it. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve."

Storytelling at short notice was her special talent.