She waited quivering. Surely there was more to come. She listened for it even while she shrank in every nerve.
It came at length slowly, heavily, like a death-sentence uttered within her. "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence."
The words were spoken, the vision passed. Avery sat huddled in her chair as one stricken to the earth, rapt in a trance of dread foreboding from which Jeanie was powerless to rouse her.
The lightning flashed again, and the thunder crashed above them like the clanging of brazen gates. From the room behind them came the sound of a man's laugh, but it was a laugh that chilled her to the soul.
Again there came the sound of the piano,—a tremendous chord, then a slow-swelling volume of harmony, a muffled burst of music like the coming of a great procession still far away.
Avery sprang upright as one galvanized into action by an electric force.
"I cannot bear it!" she cried aloud, "I cannot bear it!"
She almost thrust Jeanie from her. "Oh, go, child, go! Tell him—tell him—" Her voice broke, went into a gasping utterance more painful than speech, finally dropped into hysterical sobbing.
Jeanie sprang into the dark room with a cry of, "Piers, oh, Piers!"—and the music stopped, went out utterly as flame extinguished in water.
"What's the matter?" said Piers.
His voice sounded oddly defiant, almost savage. But Jeanie was too precipitate to notice it.