le
breathing in the room like that of a sleeping child. It was a moment
before she realized that the breathing was her own, and she looked round
her like one who had come out of a trance.

"It is gone," she said aloud. "It is gone." A great sigh came from her.

Mechanically she put down the candle, smoothed the pillows of her bed,
adjusted the coverings, and prepared to lie down; but, with a sudden
impulse, she turned to the window and the door.

"It is gone," she said again. With a little laugh of hushed triumph, she
turned and made again the cabalistic sign at the bed, where the Thing
had first assaulted her, and then at that point in the room near the
door where she had felt it crouching.

"Oh, Ewie Gal," she added, speaking to that Romany Sage long since laid
to rest in the Roumelian country, "you did not talk to me for nothing.
You were right--yes, you were right, old Ewie Gal. It was there,"--she
looked again at the place where the Thing had been--"and your curse
drove it away."

With confidence she went to the door and unlocked it. Going to the
window she opened it also, but she compromised sufficiently to open it
at the top instead of at the bottom. Presently she laid her head on her
pillow with a sigh of content.

Once again she composed herself to sleep in the darkness. But now there
came other invasions, other disturbers of the night. In her imagination
a man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River,
who had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness.
As she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions
of things which her childhood had known--moonlit passes in the Bosnian,
Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant
voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun
deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted
with flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels
thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert,
while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a
tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the
western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate
green and purple.

Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
there was a smile at her lips. If one could have seen her through the
darkness, one would have said that she was like some wil