ever, her teeth chattering,
her limbs numb.

Death had been so near! She had felt an icy breath across her throat!
She was frightened--hideously, abjectly, miserably frightened. Death
lurked for her, there outside in the dark, from behind the acacia tree!
Death in the guise of a jealous madman, whose hate had been whetted by
an hour's lonely watch in the dark--lonely, but for his thoughts.

Tears of self-pity as well as of fear rose to the unfortunate girl's
eyes; convulsive sobs shook her shoulders and tore at her heart till she
felt that she must choke. She threw out her arms across the table and
buried her face in them and lay there, sobbing and moaning in her terror
and in her misery.

How long she remained thus, crying and half inert with mental anguish
and pain, she could not afterwards have told. Nor did she know what it
was that roused her from this torpor, and caused her suddenly to sit up
in her chair, upright, wide-awake, her every sense on the alert.

Surely she could not have heard the fall of footsteps at the back of the
house! There was the whole width of the inner room and two closed doors
between her and the yard at the back, and the ground there was soft and
muddy; no footstep, however firm, could raise echoes there.

And yet she had heard! Of that she felt quite sure, heard with that
sixth sense of which she, in her ignorance, knew nothing, but which,
nevertheless, now had roused her from that coma-like state into which
terror had thrown her, and set every one of her nerves tingling once
more and pulsating with life and the power to feel.

For the moment all her faculties seemed merged into that of hearing.
With that same sixth sense she heard the stealthy footsteps coming
nearer and nearer. They had not approached from the village, but from
the fields at the back, and along the little path which led through the
unfenced yard straight to the back door.

These footsteps--which seemed like the footsteps of ghosts, so
intangible were they--were now so near that to Klara's supersensitive
mind they appeared to be less than ten paces from the back door.

Then she heard another footstep--she heard it quite distinctly, even
though walls and doors were between her and them--she heard the movement
from behind the acacia tree--the one that stands at the corner of the
house, in full view of both the doors--she heard the rustle among its
low-hanging branches and that hissing sound as of an indrawn breath.