sigh.

She tried to tell herself there was no danger--that these peculiar
actions sprang from the old man's fancy--but the house, her surroundings,
her loneliness, contradicted her. To her over-acute senses the thought of
Blackburn in that room, so often consecrated to the formula of death,
suggested a special and unaccountable menace. Under such a strain the
supernatural assumed vague and singular shapes.

She slept for only a little while. Then she lay awake, listening with a
growing expectancy for some message to slip across the court. The moon
had ceased struggling. The wind cried. The baying of a dog echoed
mournfully from a great distance. It was like a remote alarm bell which
vibrates too perfectly, whose resonance is too prolonged.

She sat upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating
insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the
message had come--a soft, shrouded sound, another long-drawn sigh.

She tried to call across the court. At first no response came from her
tight throat. When it did at last, her voice was unfamiliar in her own
ears, the voice of one who has to know a thing but shrinks from asking.

"Uncle!"

The wind mocked her.

"It is nothing," she told herself, "nothing."

But her vigil had been too long, her loneliness too complete. Her earlier
impression of the presence of death in the decaying house tightened its
hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled.
The thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across the
court. The dark, empty corridors at first were an impassable barrier, but
while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she strengthened her
courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. She might get Jenkins.

When she stood in the main hall she hesitated. It would probably be a
long time, provided he heard at all, before Jenkins could answer her. Her
candle outlined the entrance to the musty corridor. Just a few running
steps down there, a quick rap at the door, and, perhaps, in an instant
her uncle's voice, and the blessed power to return to her room and sleep!

While her fear grew she called on her pride to let her accomplish that
brief, abhorrent journey.

Then for the first time a different doubt came to her. As she waited
alone in this disturbing nocturnal intimacy of an old house, she shrank
from no thought of human intrusion, and she wondered if her uncle had
been afraid of that, too