derations. He came back to bed
without waking. She closed his eyelids. Presently he composed himself
quietly to sleep, or rather to deeper sleep. She contrived to make him
swallow something from the tumbler beside the bed.

Then she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air
blow in too fresh and keen. She put the candle where it could not reach
him. The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a little,
but all through her under-being ran the warnings of a curious alarm. And
it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand and pulling
the string of the blind with the other, that her husband sat up again in
bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly audible. The eyes
had opened wide again. He pointed. She stood stock still and listened,
her shadow distorted on the blind. He did not come out towards her as at
first she feared.

The whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too, beyond all she had
ever known.

"They are roaring in the Forest further out... and I... must go and
see." He stared beyond her as he said it, to the woods. "They are
needing me. They sent for me...." Then his eyes wandering back again to
things within the room, he lay down, his purpose suddenly changed. And
that change was horrible as well, more horrible, perhaps, because of its
revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her.

The singular phrase chilled her blood, for a moment she was utterly
terrified. That tone of the somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so
distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked.
Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the
window-sill, shaking in every limb. She had an awful feeling for a
moment that something was coming in to fetch him.

"Not yet, then," she heard in a much lower voice from the bed, "but
later. It will be better so... I shall go later...."

The words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her so
long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to have
brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to think
about. They gave it form; they brought it closer; they sent her thoughts
to her Deity in a wild, deep prayer for help and guidance. For here was
a direct, unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes and claims
her husband recognized while he kept them almost wholly to himself.

By the time she reached his side and knew the