“You had a dream, dear!” David said, tenderly. “She must have had a bad dream!” David explained to Flora, who came upstairs carrying a candle, and with a ghastly face, and to Hedda and Trude, who appeared from another direction, frightened and pale.
“Oh, no—no—no! I didn’t dream it!” Gabrielle said, still gasping and clinging tight to David, but in a somewhat quieter tone. “No, I didn’t dream it! She—I had just put out the light and she—she came into my room——”
“Now, don’t get excited, dear,” David interrupted the rising tone reassuringly. “We’re all here, and she can’t hurt you! What did you think you saw?”
“She came to my door,” Gabrielle whispered, with a heaving breast and a dry throat. “She was—she was——” Her voice rose on a shrill note of terror in spite of herself, and she looked into David’s eyes with a pathetic childish effort to control herself. “She was—smiling at me!” Gabrielle whispered.
David felt his own flesh creep; it was Flora’s voice that said somewhat harshly:
“Come down to Sylvia’s room for the rest of the night, Gabrielle.”
They were all in the doorway of Gabrielle’s room; the lamp that David had carried upstairs he had placed just within it, in a sort of alcove. Now he picked up the light and said reassuringly:
“Look here, dear, nobody’s gone out of the hall! We’ll go all over your room, and open the wardrobes, and look under the bed——”
He had gotten so far, turning courageously into the apartment, when he stopped, and Gabrielle screamed again. For the light now shone upon the girl’s tumbled bed, her desk, her bureau, her bookshelves. And standing close to the latter, with bright mad eyes fixed upon them all, and something of the hunted look of a cornered yet unfrightened animal, was a small, bent old woman, with gray hair straggling out upon the gray shawl she wore over her shoulders, and an extinguished candle in the stick she carried in her hands.
David’s heart came into his mouth with shock; there was an uncanny and fearful quality about such an apparition in the quiet winter night and in the shadowy old house. Flora, behind him, made a sound of despair, and Hedda and Trude moaned together. Afterward, it seemed to him odd that it was Gabrielle who spoke.