terribly alone.

If she could rest, if she could sleep, she thought that strength might
return to her--the strength to grapple with and overthrow the evil that
had entered into and tainted her whole life. But till sleep should come
to her, she was impotent. She was heavy and numb with fatigue.

She lay down at length with a vague sense of physical relief beneath her
crushing weight of trouble. How unutterably weary she was! How tired--how
tired of life!

Time passed. The moon rose higher, filling the room with its weird cold
light. Avery lay asleep.

Exhaustion had done for her what no effort of will could have
accomplished, closing her eyes, drawing a soft veil of oblivion across
her misery.

But it was only a temporary lull. The senses were too alert, too fevered,
for true repose. That blessed interval of unconsciousness was all too
short. After a brief, brief respite she began to dream.

And in her dream she saw a man being tortured in a burning, fiery
furnace, imprisoned behind bars of iron, writhing, wrestling, agonizing,
to be free. She saw the flames leaping all around him, and in the flames
were demon-faces that laughed and gibed and jested. She saw his hands all
blistered in the heat, reaching out to her, straining through those cruel
bars, beseeching her vainly for deliverance. And presently, gazing with a
sick horror that compelled, she saw his face....

With a gasping cry she awoke, started up with every nerve stretched and
quivering, her heart pounding as if it would choke her. It was a
dream--it was a dream! She whispered it to herself over and over again,
striving to control those awful palpitations. Surely it was all a dream!

Stay! What was that? A sound in the room beyond--a movement--a step! She
sprang up, obeying blind impulse, sped softly to the intervening door,
with hands that trembled shot the bolt. Then, like a hunted creature,
almost distracted by the panic of her dream, she slipped back to the
gloomy four-poster, and cowered down again.

Lying there, crouched and quivering, she began to count those hammering
heart-beats, and wondered wildly if the man on the other side of the door
could hear them also. She was sure that he had been there, sure that he
had been on the point of entering when she had shot the bolt.

He would not enter now, she whispered to her quaking heart. She would not
have to meet him before the morning. And by then she would be strong. It
was only her weariness t