oom on the
Sagalac, with its four walls, but its unlocked doors--for Gabriel Druse
said that he could not bear that last sign of his exile--here in the
fortress of the town-dweller there was a strange trembling of her pulses
in the presence of a mere hallucination or nightmare--the first she had
had ever. Her dreams in the past had always been happy and without the
black fancies of nightmare. On the night that Jethro Fawe had first
confronted her father and herself, and he had been carried to the hut in
the Wood, her sleep had been disturbed and restless, but dreamless; in
her sleep on the night of the day of his release, she had been tossed
upon vague clouds of mental unrest; but that was the first really
disordered sleep she had ever known.

Holding the candle above her head, she looked in the mirror on her
dressing-table, and laughed nervously at the shocked look in her
eyes, at the hand pressed upon the bosom whose agitations troubled
the delicate linen at her breast. The pale light of the candle,
the reflection from the white muslin of her dressing-table and her
nightwear, the strange, deep darkness of her eyes, the ungathered tawny
hair falling to her shoulders, gave an unusual paleness to her face.

"What a ninny I am!" she said aloud as she looked at herself, her tongue
chiding her apprehensive eyes, her laugh contemptuously adding its
comment on her tremulousness. "It was a real nightmare--a waking
nightmare, that's what it was."

She searched the room once more, however-every corner, under the bed,
the chest of drawers and the dressing-table, before she got into bed
again, her feet icily cold. And yet again before settling down she
looked round, perplexed and inquiring. Placing the matches beside the
candlestick, she blew out the light. Then, half-turning on her side with
her face to the wall, she composed herself to sleep.

Resolutely putting from her mind any sense of the supernatural, she shut
her eyes with confidence of coming sleep. While she was, however, still
within the borders of wakefulness, and wholly conscious, she felt the
Thing jump from the floor upon her legs, and crouch there with that
deadening pressure which was not weight. Now with a start of anger
she raised herself, and shot out a determined hand to seize the Thing,
whatever it was. Her hand grasped nothing, and again she distinctly
heard a soft thud as of something jumping on the floor. Exasperated, she
drew herself out of bed, lit t