"How could you frighten me so, Julia!"
We clung together and scolded each other for a minute, then each returned to her own room. But I not to sleep. Listening acutely for every sound, yet shrinking from every sound as it came, I tossed and turned with wide-open, feverish eyes. Suspicious circumstances at which I had been disposed to laugh in the day, took on a sinister complexion in the watches of the night. The loneliness of the place, its distance from every habitation—details to which I held no special distaste before—got hideously upon my nerves at last. Supposing anything happened, in what a position did we three women stand! What chance was there of help?
In my mind I surveyed the prospect from my window. The trackless Denes, the wild, unfriendly sea. Shuddering, I turned mentally to the outlook from Julia's room. What of reassuring was there in the rudiments of an unlighted road across a desert of ugly waste lands?
I was thinking of the road, I suppose, when at last I fell on sleep; for my dream was a nightmare of toiling over it with Julia, in a frantic attempt to escape from some horror, none the less terrible for being undefined, ever close upon our heels.
It was some disturbing but uncertain sound that wakened me from this dreaming to an inner dream. Just a vision, seen in a flash and gone, of two men standing in a light thrown from an upper window, and looking up to it.
From this apparition so vividly presented to my brain, I was awakened by a repetition of the disturbing sound, soft but distinct now. I flew up in bed with a beating heart and the certainty that someone, somewhere, had thrown a clod of earth at a window—not mine; at the back of the house; Julia's, or Mrs Ragg's.
A minute, and I was out of my bed and into Julia's room. I laid a hand on my sister's shoulder. "Julia," I whispered, "wake up. I've had such horrible dreams."
The candle I held in a shaking hand showed the glinting green of Julia's eyes within their half-opened lids. "I'm so comfy," she muttered; "I'm having such a lovely sleep. Go back to bed, Isabella."
But I crept into Julia's bed, instead, and clasped her close for the comfort of her presence.
"I dreamt two men were looking up at a window," I said, "—do keep awake, Julia. I don't know why it seemed so horrid—nothing has ever seemed so horrid before. And—you're going off to sleep again, Julia!—you must listen!—someone flung something at a window. That was not a dream. I heard it quite distinctly."