Dorothea paid no attention whatever. Instead she rose to her feet and, flinging her arms wide, yawned elaborately. It was a delicate suggestion, which caused the men to look at their watches, and the party forthwith dispersed.
Dorothea, for all the sand in her shoes, seemed to walk to the house on air. The inspiration had arrived, fully accoutered, as it were, on the breath of Jennie's complaint.
The work in hand called for the dexterity of the true artist. With managerial instinct, Dorothea, repelling any attempt at conversation, waited only until Jennie was comfortably ensconced in bed, to turn the lamp down so that it glimmered in sickly fashion, before beginning proceedings. Then, seating herself beside the bed—an eerie figure in her straight, white gown—she shook her head dismally and indulged in a heartfelt sigh. Jennie, her nerves already on edge with the ghost stories of the hour before, turned startled eyes upon her.
"What is the matter? What is it?" she inquired anxiously.
"I—feel—strange," said Dorothea. She turned upon her victim a face full of uncanny suggestion. Divested of its perpetual smile, it seemed to Jennie as unfamiliar as a room from which an accustomed piece of furniture had been moved.
"I feel—strange. Something terrible is happening somewhere.—I can tell—I always can—I am going to have a vision—I can feel it—It always comes like this." With a quick hand she extinguished the lamp. "It will come in a dream," she muttered. "Let me sleep, oh, let me sleep!"
She made a sweeping pass with her out- stretched hands and, after a dramatic pause, fell heavily on her pillow, where she instantly proceeded to fall into a deep and trance-like slumber—a slumber that prevailed through the terrified questionings, whimperings, and agitated shakings by her friend.
It is an awesome thing to seek repose beside one wrapped in trance; it is worse to traverse unlighted halls and ghostly stairs in an effort to awake the gifted medium's family. Wrapped in terror as in an icy sheet, after divers Herculean efforts to rouse the log beside her, the responsive victim fell into a troubled slumber with her head well under the bedclothes.
The gray dawn was in the room when she was awakened by what seemed to be muffled sobs from—the figure beside her. In an instant wide awake and palpitating, she fell upon Dorothea. "What is it? Oh, what is it?" she cried.
"I have had it," said Dorothea in a sepulchral whisper. "The vision. Oh," she turned dramatically from the instant question, "I can't bear to tell you!—It was about you."