It was ten o’clock.
I got up and looked out of the window. The street was quiet and dark as the water beyond it. Cold stars shone feebly through the clouds above the bay, and the revolving planet at the lighthouse on Long Point blinked every minute. From the highlands another light shone steadily, and at the entrance to the harbor a bell-buoy swung sadly back and forth. The waves, rocking the floating tongue, set it ringing louder as they rose in strength, and let it die away again to the tinkle of a tea-bell. I was glad the fog-horns were not groaning in the harbor. I hate fog-horns.
No man ever knows the weariness of a woman who waits for him. No man has ever experienced to the full the hours when the night grows longest, when the mind catches at the faintest sound in the thoroughfare and listens to the ebb of footsteps that after all were not quite the ones expected. Because, universally, it is the woman who is in the house and the man who is outside, he has missed for centuries the finest form of torture devised by the unthinking and the tardy and the dissipated for those who must sit at the window. There is no use in saying afterward, “Why did you wait up?” and the tired reply, “I won’t again.” She will do so again, goaded by forebodings that grow with the minutes, and she will keep on sitting up for him until the end of life, when, if there is any justice, the man will go first into the meandering meadows and on the banks of the last river wait for a cycle or two.
Every far-away sound attaches profound significance to itself—a piano, a child crying, a window being raised; and the night seems full of freight-trains chugging up a grade, although you never hear an engine all day long. I have heard the whistle of steamboats in inland cities. But worse is that rattle and bang up the street, that clinking of bottles and running feet, that continued panting of the engine which it is not worth while to shut off, by which you know that you have sat up till the milk is being delivered and that it is too late!
Why did the judge not come? It was after eleven o’clock.
I wished that it was Jasper for whom I was waiting, for more reasons than the obvious one. Jasper would prove that the phenomena which had harassed the House of the Five Pines were not psychic; Judge Bell would prove that they were.
A hand on the window-pane! On the outside of the window-pane was a hand. There was no body to it, but in the lower corner of the window where I sat a hand was feeling around. It was a small hand. It knocked.
At the sound of flesh on glass my heart rebelled; it ceased functioning altogether.
The hand knocked again, impatiently. Then a voice was added.