She tried to tell herself there was no danger--that these peculiar actions sprang from the old man's fancy--but
the house, her surroundings, her loneliness, contradicted her. To her over-acute senses the thought of
Blackburn in that room, so often consecrated to the formula of death, suggested a special and unaccountable
menace. Under such a strain the supernatural assumed vague and singular shapes.
She slept for only a little while. Then she lay awake, listening with a growing expectancy for some message to
slip across the court. The moon had ceased struggling. The wind cried. The baying of a dog echoed
mournfully from a great distance. It was like a remote alarm bell which vibrates too perfectly, whose
resonance is too prolonged.
She sat upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating insufferably, felt her way to the window. From
the wing opposite the message had come--a soft, shrouded sound, another long-drawn sigh.
She tried to call across the court. At first no response came from her tight throat. When it did at last, her voice
was unfamiliar in her own ears, the voice of one who has to know a thing but shrinks from asking.
"Uncle!"
The wind mocked her.
"It is nothing," she told herself, "nothing."
But her vigil had been too long, her loneliness too complete. Her earlier impression of the presence of death in
the decaying house tightened its hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled. The
thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across the court. The dark, empty corridors at first
were an impassable barrier, but while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she strengthened her
courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. She might get Jenkins.
When she stood in the main hall she hesitated. It would probably be a long time, provided he heard at all,
before Jenkins could answer her. Her candle outlined the entrance to the musty corridor. Just a few running
steps down there, a quick rap at the door, and, perhaps, in an instant her uncle's voice, and the blessed power
to return to her room and sleep!
While her fear grew she called on her pride to let her accomplish that brief, abhorrent journey.
Then for the first time a different doubt came to her. As she waited alone in this disturbing nocturnal intimacy
of an old house, she shrank from no thought of human intrusion, and she wondered if her uncle had been
afraid of that, too, of the sort of thing that might lurk in the ancient wing with its recollections of birth and
suffering and death. But he had gone there as an escape. Surely he had been afraid of men. It shamed her that,
in spite of that, her fear defined itself ever more clearly as something indefinable. With a passionate
determination to strangle such thoughts she held her breath. She tried to close her mind. She entered the
corridor. She ran its length. She knocked at the locked door of the old bedroom. She shrank as the echoes
rattled from the dingy walls where her candle cast strange reflections. There was no other answer. A sense of
an intolerable companionship made her want to cry out for brilliant light, for help. She screamed.
"Uncle Silas! Uncle Silas!"
Through the silence that crushed her voice she became aware finally of the accomplishment of its mission by
death in this house. And she fled into the main hall. She jerked at the bell rope. The contact steadied her,
stimulated her to reason. One slender hope remained. The oppressive bedroom might have driven Silas