Towards midnight, Miss Grimshaw was awakened from her slumbers by a sound as of some person weeping and wailing. She sat up in bed and listened. It was Effie's voice, and she heard her own name called repeatedly.
"Miss Grimshaw! Miss Grimshaw! Miss Grimshaw!"
In a moment she was out of bed and wrapped in a dressing-gown. The next, she was in Effie's room.
The child was sitting up in bed in the moonlight. Her subliminal mind had constructed a nightmare out of a gallows, a guilty conscience, and a stolen postage-stamp.
"I took it out of the drawer of the writing-desk. I didn't mean it. I did it for fun," cried Effie, her face buried in the girl's shoulder. "And I dreamt. Ow! Ow!"
"What on earth's the matter?"
It was Mr. French, in a dressing-gown, with a lighted candle in his hand.
You cannot weep and wail in a pitch-pine bungalow, resonant as a fiddle, without disturbing the other occupants, and behind Mr. French moved figures dimly suggestive of the chorus of the Greek drama waiting to come on.
"I don't know what the matter is," said Miss Grimshaw, her mind divided between Effie and a feeling of thankfulness that she had her slippers on. "She seems to have taken a postage stamp or some nonsense. It's night terror. Now, Effie, don't stop crying if you feel you want to, but just tell me it all. Once you have told me it all, the bad things will go away."
"I stuck it on the letter," sobbed Effie, who had passed from the howling to the blubbering stage, "an' I stuck the letter in the box; and I dreamt Mr. Chopping and the p'leeceman were going to hang me."