f I want to.... Oh! ask Miss Maggie to tap at my door very softly
when she comes out from dinner. Has she gone down yet?"

"I think I heard her step just now, ma'am."

"Very well; then you can just tell Susan to let her know. How was
Mr. Laurie looking, Charlotte?"

"I haven't seen him, ma'am."

"Very well. Then that is all, Charlotte. You can just look in here
after Miss Maggie and settle me for the night."

Then the door closed, and Mrs. Baxter instantly began to doze off.

She was one of those persons whose moments between sleeping and
waking, especially during a little attack of feverishness, are
occupied in contemplating a number of little vivid pictures of all
kinds that present themselves to the mental vision; and she saw as
usual a quantity of these, made up of tiny details of the day that was
gone, and of other details markedly unconnected with it. She saw for
example little scenes in which Maggie and Charlotte and medicine
bottles and Chinese faces and printed pages of a book all moved
together in a sort of convincing incoherence; and she was just
beginning to lose herself in the depths of sleep, and to forget her
firm resolution of reading another page or so of the book by her side,
when a little sound came, and she opened, as she thought, her eyes.

Her reading lamp cast a funnel of light across her bed, and the rest
of the room was lit only by the fire dancing in the chimney. Yet this
was bright enough, she thought at the time, to show her perfectly
distinctly, though with shadows fleeting across it, her son's face
peering in at the door. She thought she said something; but she was
not sure afterwards. At any rate, the face did not move; and it seemed
to her that it bore an expression of such extraordinary malignity that
she would hardly have known it for her son's. In a sudden panic she
raised herself in bed, staring; and as the shadows came and went, as
she stared, the face was gone again. Mrs. Baxter drew a quick breath
or two as she looked; but there was nothing. Yet again she could have
sworn that she heard the faint jar of the closing door.

She reached out and put her hand on the bell-string that hung down
over her bed. Then she hesitated. It was too ridiculous, she told
herself. Besides, Charlotte would have gone to her room.

But the fear did not go immediately; though she told herself again and
again that it was just one of those little waking visions that she
knew so well.

She lay ba