let never would be found. Then Jeremy's heart would be
broken.

She slept from utter exhaustion, and was so found, when the room was
quite dark and only shadows moved in it, by her mother.

"Why, Mary!" said Mrs. Cole. "What are you doing here? We couldn't think
where you were. And where's Jeremy?"

"Jeremy!" She started up, remembering everything.

"Hasn't he come back? Oh, he's lost and he'll be killed, and it will be
all my fault!" She burst into another fit of wild hysterical crying.

Her mother took her arm. "Mary, explain--What have you done?"

Mary explained, her teeth chattering, her head aching so that she could
not see.

"And you shut him up like that? Whatever--Oh, Mary, you wicked girl! And
Jeremy--He's been away two hours now--"

She turned off, leaving Mary alone in the black room.

Mary was left to every terror that can beset a lonely, hysterical
child--terror of Jeremy's fate, terror of Hamlet's loss, terror of her
own crimes, above all, terror of the lonely room, the waving elms and
the gathering dark. She could not move; she could not even close the
door of the wardrobe, into whose shelter she had again crept. She stared
at the white sheet of the window, with its black bars like railings and
its ghostly hinting of a moon that would soon be up above the trees.
Every noise frightened her, the working of the "separator" in a distant
part of the farm, the whistling of some farm-hand out in the yard,
the voice of some boy, "coo-ee"-ing faintly, the lingering echo of the
vanished day--all these seemed to accuse her, to point fingers at her,
to warn her of some awful impending punishment. "Ah! you're the little
girl," they seemed to say, "who lost Jeremy's dog and broke Jeremy's
heart." She was sure that someone was beneath her bed. That old terror
haunted her with an almost humorous persistency every night before she
went to sleep, but to-night there was a ghastly certainty and imminence
about it that froze her blood. She crouched up against the hanging
skirts, gazing at the black line between the floor and the white sheets,
expecting at every second to see a protruding black mask, bloodshot
eyes, a coarse hand. The memory of the burglary that they had had in the
spring came upon her with redoubled force. Ah! surely, surely someone
was there! She heard a movement, a scraping of a boot upon the floor,
the thick hurried breathing of some desperate villain...

Then these fears gave way to something w