“I should not trouble if I were you; it will only wake you up and spoil your chances of going to sleep again,” replied Grace. “If you feel at all nervous, come and lie down here beside me, and I can rouse you at once if there seems any need.”
“But you will want to go to sleep yourself,” objected Bertha, to whom, however, the plan commended itself as the most reasonable thing to do.
“Oh, it does not matter when I sleep; I do not know that it would very much matter if I stayed awake all night,” said Grace, “although, as a matter of fact, I am always as sleepy as if I worked hard all day. But, Bertha, I’ve got a piece of news for you, and I feel as if it will not keep until the morning. I have distinctly felt my big toe to-night.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bertha, who was too sleepy to take in the full significance of this information.
Grace laughed softly. “Don’t you understand that for all this time since my fall I have had no feet at all? When anything has touched my foot or feet I have not known it, unless I have seen it. Imagine, then, what it is to feel that one has suddenly acquired a big toe, even though all the parts in between are missing.”
“Oh, my dear, how glad I am!” cried Bertha, leaning over to kiss Grace; and just at that moment Bouncer whined again, and then began scratching at the door in sign that he very badly wanted to get out.
“I guess that a friend of his has come for a stroll in this direction to-night. Let him out, Bertha; he is not likely to run away before morning, and you will get no more sleep if the creature is going to be restless,” said Grace.
Bertha got up then and, feeling thankful that she had not undressed on the previous night, felt her way carefully across the outer room to the door, at which the dog was eagerly scratching to get out. There was no anger in the dog’s manner, only joyful excitement, and the creature nearly knocked Bertha down as, with a chorus of joyful barks and whines, it burst out at the door and tore away across the dark paddock. But there was no more sleep for either Grace or Bertha that night, for from the distance Bouncer made night—or rather darkness, for it was really morning—hideous with his lamentations—whining, barking, howling in a passion of entreaty (so it seemed to those who listened from the inside).
Grace would not hear of Bertha going out to see what was wrong. “Time enough when daylight comes for investigations of that sort,” she said, and Bertha had not the least desire to withstand the mandate, for all her own feelings pointed to the desirability of staying where she was.
At last came the grey light of dawn, and Bertha sprang up, eager now to enquire into the disturbance of the night. The first thing she saw on opening the door was a good-sized packing case standing on the edge of the veranda, and all at once she realized that it must have been this being put down which had roused her from sleep so suddenly in the night; but Grace would not have heard it, because her room was on the other side of the house, and her window looked the other way. Farther away she could see Bouncer, tied in an ignominious fashion to one of the posts where the lines were stretched for drying clothes, and then she understood that the intruder, whoever he was, must have been known to the dog, which wanted to follow him, but got tied up instead.