To-night he sat up suddenly, with a premonition of something strange, and gazed into the darkness of the bedroom, seeing only the dim outline of the other bed in which his two younger brothers slept. After a long moment of mysterious rustling, a thin ray of light crept in under the door, then the handle turned very softly, and his mother glided in swiftly, bearing a candle that made a monstrous shadow follow and bend over her. She was fully dressed in out-door attire, wearing her bonnet and sacque and muffler.
Her eyes were wide with excitement and shone weirdly, and the whole face wore an uncanny look.
Billy trembled in cold terror. His mouth opened gaspingly.
“Sh-h-h-h!” whispered his mother, putting a forefinger to her lips. Then, in hurried accents, she breathed, “Quick, get up and dress to oncet!”
Magnetized by her face, he slipped hastily from the bed, too awed to question.
“Sh-h-h-h!” she breathed again, “or you’ll wake Ruth.” Then, moving with the same noiseless precipitancy, her shadow now growing to giant, now dwindling to dwarf, “Quick, quick, children!” she whispered, shaking them. The two younger boys sat up, dazed by sleep and the candle, and were silently bundled out of bed, yawning and blinking, and automatically commencing to draw on the socks they found thrust into their hands.
“Your best clothes,” she whispered to Billy, throwing open the cupboard in which they hung.
The action seemed to loosen his tongue.
“But it ain’t Sunday,” he breathed.
“Sh-h-h-h! To-day is a holiday. Put them on quick, quick!” she replied, in the same awful whisper. “We are goin’ out of the land of bondage in haste with our loins girded. And lo! in the mornin’ in every house there was one dead.”