"O Timmy!" Eleanor had cried, protesting.
"Well, I forgot to God-bless Pa Cary," said Tim, as if that justified his reappearance.
"Tim! Go right back to bed!" said Eleanor, with a conscientious attempt at sternness. Tim hesitated, wavered on the threshold, and she gained in courage. "Go back at once!" she said.
His under lip began to tremble. "I can't God-bless wivout somebody to say it to!" he said, and Eleanor got up, took him by the hand, and led him up to bed and his devotions.
Since then she had not come down again, and when Rosamund went in search of her it was to find her on her knees beside Tim's bed, asleep, her pale gold hair mingling with the yellow of his, her arms across his little body, one of his hands on her cheek.
Rosamund crept downstairs again, the loneliness of a moment ago pressing now upon her heart like a pain. The sitting-room was warm and cosy, with its open fire and the lamp with a yellow shade; but it was empty, for all that. She crossed the room to the window that faced the valley and rolled up the shade. Through the wind-swept air Mother Cary's light twinkled brightly on the opposite mountain; that was a home, too. It added to her sense of loneliness. She went back to her place by the table, her thoughts wandering—from the happy two in the room overhead, to her plans for Yetta; from Ogilvie, to Flood; from the present——
But, gradually, insensibly, into her mental atmosphere, there crept a shadowy, indefinable influence, something malevolent and strangely disquieting. She had never known fear; but as she sat there she shuddered, became cold with an unearthly chill, as if some premonition of horror were laying its clammy hand upon her. She said afterward that she felt herself in a cloud of dread and apprehension such as one might feel before the apparition of something ghostly or uncanny. It was intolerable. She must shake off such mental cowering, and forced herself to turn towards the window through which Mother Cary's light could be seen, thinking the friendly beacon would reassure her.
Then, although her heart seemed for an instant to stop beating, she sprang up; but her knees refused their burden, and she sank again into her chair, leaning forward with straining eyes, clutching its arms; for the light on the mountain was blotted out by a hideous thing, a white face set in shaggy hair, a sneering face, a face where drink and hate and fear had set their marks. As she sprang up and sank down again the wicked glare of hate turned into a more frightful leer; then the creature raised a horrid fist, shook it towards her—and vanished into the night.
It was Eleanor who came running downstairs at the cry she tried to choke back.
The two kept watch through the night, and morning found Rosamund shaken and feverish, but firmly determined to lay aside her dread, and at all hazards to keep her friends in the city in ignorance of it.