just as he blew out the candle, and Miriam,
accordingly, was the last vision that journeyed with him into the country
of dreams and sweet forgetfulness.

The night was perfectly still. Winter, black and hard, lay about the
house like an iron wall. No wind stirred. Snow covered the world of
mountain and moor outside, and Silence, supreme at midnight, poured all
her softest forces upon the ancient building and its occupants.
Spinrobin, curled up in the middle of the big four-poster, slept like a
tired baby.

II

It was a good deal later when somewhere out of that mass of silence rose
the faint beginnings of a sound that stirred first cautiously about the
very foundations of the house, and then, mounting inch by inch, through
the hall, up the staircase, along the corridor, reached the floor where
the secretary slept so peacefully, and finally entered his room. Its
muffled tide poured most softly over all. At first only this murmur was
audible, as of "footsteps upon wool," of wind or drifting snow, a mere
ghost of sound; but gradually it grew, though still gentle and subdued,
until it filled the space from ceiling unto floor, pressing in like water
dripping into a cistern with ever-deepening note as its volume increased.
The trembling of air in a big belfry where bells have been a-ringing
represents best the effect, only it was a trifle sharper in
quality--keener, more alive.

But, also, there was something more in it--something gong-like and
metallic, yet at the same time oddly and suspiciously human. It held a
temper, too, that somehow woke the "panic sense," as does the hurried
note of a drum--some quick emotional timbre that stirs the sleeping
outposts of apprehension and alarm. On the other hand, it was constant,
neither rising nor falling, and thus ordinarily, it need not have stirred
any emotion at all--least of all the emotion of consternation. Yet, there
was that in it which struck at the root of security and life. It was a
revolutionary sound.

And as it took possession of the room, covering everything with its
garment of vibration, it slipped in also, so to speak, between the
crevices of the sleeping, unprotected Spinrobin, coloring his dreams--his
innocent dreams--with the suggestion of nightmare dread. Of course, he
was too deeply wrapped in slumber to receive the faintest intimation of
this waking analysis. Otherwise he might, perhaps, have recognized the
kind of primitive, ancestral dread his remote