The house was too still.
I woke up thinking that I heard something, but there was not a sound.
The tide was out and there was no noise of waves lapping the beach. There was no wind and no murmur in the pine-trees. Then I heard what I had heard before. Some one was crying!
Mrs. Dove slept on beside me, the high mound of the bed-clothes rising regularly with her deep inhalations. If only I could sleep like that! But in spite of the fact that I had gone to bed in peace and was rested from my day in the sunlight, although I had been thinking happy domestic thoughts dear to the heart of contented women and far removed from overwrought nervous hallucinations, still I could not deceive myself—I heard crying! They were weeping softly, in a smothered way, as if they were trying not to be heard, as if they knew well they must not allow themselves to be heard, but as if their grief had passed beyond human control.
At the sound all my scant and precious reserve of courage was dissipated. The calm repose of spirit that I had been developing during the day was gone. The unearthly manifestation played on my chilled heart. I was appalled.
It was such a wailing suffocated cry! Like some one in a nightmare, or a child struggling in its sleep—or a child shut up in a room!... That was it!
I tried not to comprehend the meaning of this horror. I wanted to hide under the bed-clothes, but a voice rose above the weeping. I raised my cowardly head to be sure that what I was straining to listen to was there.... It was like the séance. I did not believe in it, but I heard it just the same. The tones were not unlike those last faint whispers I had heard in that eery hut on the sand-dunes. It was a woman’s voice, frightened and trembling and shut away from me by two partitions, but still I understood it.
“No— No— You can’t go! He would kill you if you ever got out.”
The cry was distraught and agonized, terrified as only a mother bird’s is when the young robin hops out of the nest to the branch and a cat crouches under the tree, or of a lioness whose cub is facing a coiled snake at the mouth of her deep cave.