Barbara in Brittany

by E. A. Gillie

They did not return to Neuilly until the evening, where they met the rest of the pension at dinner. Besides two brothers of the Belvoir family, there were a number of French visitors and one English family, to whom Miss Britton and her niece took an immediate dislike. The father, who, they were told, was a solicitor whose health had broken down, was greedy and vulgar, and his son and daughter were pale, frightened-looking creatures, who took no part in the gay conversation which the French kept up.

After dinner, when every one else went into the salon for music, the solicitor and his children retired to their rooms, which Mademoiselle Belvoir and her brothers seemed to resent. The former confided to Barbara, in very quaint English, that they had never had such people in their house before, and Aunt Anne, who overheard the remark, shook her head sagely.

"I would not trust them, Mademoiselle" (Miss Britton was English from the sole of her foot to the tip of her tongue). "They seem unpleasant, and I have a great power for reading faces." At which Mademoiselle Belvoir murmured something about wishing her mother were back.

However, the evening was a pleasant one, though Barbara was so tired that she was hardly an intelligent listener to the music provided, and fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

She was, therefore, a little surprised when she awoke suddenly two hours later for apparently no reason at all. She had been dreaming about something exciting, and lay trying to remember what it was, when an eerie feeling stole over her, and it seemed as if she heard breathing—which was not her aunt's—close beside her. She did not dare to move for a moment. Then she turned her head very gently, and between the two windows near the recess she was sure she saw a dark figure. The longer she watched the surer she became, and she knew it could not be her aunt, whom she heard breathing quietly in the other bed.

It was certainly a horrible sensation, and all the unpleasant stories she had ever read crowded into her mind. At first she could not think what to do, but at last made up her mind to go across the room to Miss Britton's bed and tell her.

Yawning, and pretending to wake up gradually, though all the time she felt as if she had been lying there for hours, she called out, "Aunt Anne, I can't sleep, so I'm coming into your bed."

Miss Britton awoke at once—she was a light sleeper—and at first I think she imagined her niece was mad.

"If you can't sleep in your own bed," she said, "I'm quite sure you won't sleep in mine, for it's not big enough for two."

But Barbara persisted, and at last her aunt gave way. "Well," she said at last, rather crossly, "be quick if you are coming. I don't want to be kept awake all night."