His face took a look of terror. The bare idea scared him. “I say, don’t you invent impossible horrors,” gasped he. “She couldn’t come; she has never heard of the place in connection with me. She has never heard anything about my people, or where they live, or don’t live, or whether I have any. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Roger.”
III.
People say you can never sleep well in a strange bed. I know I did not sleep well, but very badly, that first night at Lady Bevere’s. It was not the fault of the bed, or of its strangeness; it was Roger’s trouble haunting me.
He did not seem to have slept well either, to judge by his looks when I went into his room in the morning. His fair, pleasant face was pale; his lips trembled, the blue eyes had torment in their depths.
“I have had a bad dream,” he said, in answer to a remark I made. “An awful dream. It came to me in my last sleep this morning; and morning dreams, they say, come true. I’m afraid I have you to thank for it, Johnny.”
“Me!”
“You suggested last night, startling me well-nigh out of my senses by it, that Lizzie might follow me down here. Well, I dreamt she did so. I saw her in the dining-room, haranguing my mother, her red-gold hair streaming over her shoulders and her arms stretched wildly out. Uncle John stood in a corner of the room, looking on.”
I felt sorry, and told him so: of course my speaking had prompted the dream. He need not fear. If Lizzie did not know he had come down here, or that his family lived here, or anything about them, she could not follow him.