While he stood thus, a faint sound reached him in the stillness.

It was the muffled yet insistent tap of somebody apparently anxious to attract attention without making too much noise, and coming, as it seemed, from the front door.

Thalassa glanced at his wife, but she appeared to have heard nothing, and her grey head was bent over her cards.

He walked noiselessly out of the kitchen, closing the door gently behind him.
His wife remained at the table, unconscious of everything but the lay of her cards; shuffling, dealing, setting them out afresh in perpendicular rows, muttering at the obstinacy of the kings and queens as though their painted faces were alive and sensitive to her reproof.

The old house creaked and groaned in the wind, then became suddenly silent, like a man overtaken by sleep in the midst of stretching and yawning.