“It was hands with me,” Laura was fumbling in the wash-stand drawer. “There was a curio, a mummy’s hand, locked up in the top drawer of the wardrobe, at least somebody said so. It used to squeeze itself out and come crawling down, dropping from one drawer knob to the next, like a spider. My bed was next to the wardrobe. I used to roll myself up in the bedclothes till I nearly choked, but even then I could feel it through the blankets pawing at my face.”
“Oh, beastly!”
“If they’d only have let me have my kitten—but Auntie always took it away last thing. Here are the night-lights.”
“But if you’d told——”
“One doesn’t, you know. This scrap was bitterly afraid. I knew! But do you think it would tell me? Not it. We discussed Rumpelstiltskin; but there was a bear behind our chair all the while and our reflections in the looking-glass, and always the dark. Got some matches?”
She lit the night-light and set it afloat in its saucer. The tiny flame turned the black room grey—a ghostly, friendless grey. Justin glanced thoughtfully from Timothy to the swaying shadows and back again to Timothy, a small enough sojourner in the desert of double bed. He coughed.
“I say, Laura——”
“Yes?”
“I say, Laura—let’s give him two night-lights and damn the expense!”
“All right!”