nd shivered in my little bed. That his coldness, his neglect,
sprang from the discovery just made that my mother as well as my father
had just fled the house forever was as little known to me as the morning
calamity. I had been given my usual tendance and was tucked safely into
bed; but the gloom, the silence which presently settled upon the house
had a very different explanation in my mind from the real one. My sin
(for such it loomed large in my mind by this time) coloured the whole
situation and accounted for every event.

"At what hour I slipped from my bed on to the cold floor, I shall never
know. To me it seemed to be in the dead of night; but I doubt if it were
more than ten. So slowly creep away the moments to a wakeful child.
I had made a great resolve. Awful as the prospect seemed to
me,--frightened as I was by the very thought,--I had determined in
my small mind to go down into the cellar, and into that midnight hole
again, in search of the lost box. I would take a candle and matches,
this time from my own mantel-shelf, and if everyone was asleep, as
appeared from the deathly quiet of the house, I would be able to go and
come without anybody ever being the wiser.

"Dressing in the dark, I found my matches and my candle and, putting
them in one of my pockets, softly opened my door and looked out. Nobody
was stirring; every light was out except a solitary one in the lower
hall. That this still burned conveyed no meaning to my mind. How could I
know that the house was so still and the rooms dark because everyone was
out searching for some clue to my mother's flight? If I had looked at
the clock--but I did not; I was too intent upon my errand, too filled
with the fever of my desperate undertaking, to be affected by anything
not bearing directly upon it.

"Of the terror caused by my own shadow on the wall as I made the turn
in the hall below, I have as keen a recollection today as though it
happened yesterday. But that did not deter me; nothing deterred me, till
safe in the cellar I crouched down behind the casks to get my breath
again before entering the hole beyond.

"I had made some noise in feeling my way around these casks, and I
trembled lest these sounds had been heard upstairs! But this fear soon
gave place to one far greater. Other sounds were making themselves
heard. A din of small skurrying feet above, below, on every side of me!
Rats! rats in the wall! rats on the cellar bottom! How I ever stirred