One smash rather louder than the rest caused Kate to start and open her eyes. She looked up in Billy’s face steadily for some moments without moving, and the expression was so strange that in alarm he cried—
“Kate, Kate! don’t you know me?”
There was no immediate answer. There was in the slates immediately above them a single pane of glass, which gave light to the closet, and that pane now showed a deep red square of the crimson sky. Kate’s eyes wandered to the pane, and became fixed for some moments.
“What’s—that?” she whispered at last, with a strange trembling eagerness.
“It’s only the winder,” answered Billy, a little scared.
“No, it isn’t; it’s the hole you go through into the other world,” said Kate joyfully. “Billy, dear, I can’t stay any longer. I’m going through!”
Billy threw both his arms around her slight form, and rained his tears upon her face. At the same moment there was a chorus of gleeful shouts and table-smashing like thunder in the adjoining room. It was the comical fiend applauding his own song. Kate continued to gaze steadily at the crimson pane in the roof with a smile brightening on her face.
“I wish—oh, I wish there had been somebody to tell me what to do at the other side,” she said at last in a whisper so low that Billy could scarce catch it. “But maybe somebody will hold out a hand to me. I’ll keep feeling about for it. It’s growing darker. Am I going through? and is the light only at the door?”
“No, its almost night, and Rodie’s lit the candle,” said Billy. “Do you hear me, Kate? You’re awful dreamy and queer—I’m saying it’s almost night.”
“Night! night!” feebly and hazily breathed Kate. “Good-night.”