Page:The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916).pdf/174



HE first gray of dawn roused Eaton, and drawing on trousers and coat over his pajamas, he seated himself by the open window to see the house by daylight. The glow, growing in the east, showed him first that the house stood on the shore of the lake; the light came to him across water, and from the lake had come the crisp, fresh-smelling breeze that had blown into his windows through the night. As it grew lighter, he could see the house; it was an immense structure of smooth gray stone. Eaton was in its central part, his windows looking to the south. To the north of him was a wing he could not see—the wing which had contained the porte-cochère under which the motor-car had stopped the night before; and the upper part of this wing, he had been able to tell, contained the servants' quarters. To the south, in front of him, was another wing composed, apparently in part at least, of family bedrooms.

Between the house and the lake was a terrace, part flagged, part gravel, part lawn not yet green but with green shoots showing among the last year's grass. A stone parapet walled in this terrace along the top of the bluff which pitched precipitously down to the lake fifty feet below, and the narrow beach of sand and shingle. As Eaton watched, one of the two nurses who