o
her head. But she could not move. She felt that something held her and
pressed on her, as though the air were moulded about her like cast iron.

The thing stood between her and the window, stiff and white. It showed
its face, and the face was white, too. It was Angelo Reanda. She knew
it, though there seemed to be no eyes in the white thing. She felt its
dead voice speaking to her.

"An evil death on you and all your house," it said.

The face was gone again, but the thing was still there. Very, very
slowly, stiff and white, it lay back, straight from the heel upwards,
unbending as it sank, till it laid itself upon the floor, and she was
staring at the joints of the bricks in the moonlight.

Then she shrieked aloud and awoke. The moonlight had moved a foot or
more, and she knew that she had been asleep.

"It was only a dream," she said to Griggs in the morning. "I thought I
saw you dead, dear. It frightened me."

"I am not dead yet," he laughed. "It was that salad--there were potatoes
in it."

She turned away; for the contrast between the triviality of what he said
and the horror of what she had felt brought an expression to her face
which even her consummate art could not have concealed.

The impression lasted all day, and when she went to bed she carefully
closed the shutters so that the moonlight should not fall upon the
floor. The dream did not return.

"It must have been the salad," said Griggs, when she told him that she
had not been disturbed again.

But Gloria was thinking of death, and his words jarred upon her
horribly, as a trivial jest would jar on a condemned man walking from
his cell to the scaffold. In the evening Griggs went by the diligence to
Rome, and Gloria was left alone with her child and the nurse.

Then she sat down and wrote to Reanda with a full heart and a trembling
hand. She told him of her dream, and how the fear of his death had
broken her nerves. She implored him to come out and see her when Griggs
was in Rome. She could let him know when to start, if he would write one
word. It was but a little journey, she said, and the cool mountain air
would do him good. But if he would not come, she besought him to write
to her, if it were only a line, to say that he was alive. She could not
forget the dream until she should know that he was safe.

She was not critical of her writing any more, for she was no longer in
fear of being misunderstood, and she wrote desperately. It seemed to