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ant rains had done serious damage in the cemetery. Dripping from the drenching he had received in his tour of inspection, his boots muddy, and his hands dirty from holding to the precarious bushes, he shook with cold as he reported on what he had found. In his narrative he had quite forgotten the presence of Martha who sat by, silent and waxen-faced. "And you ought to see," he said, turning to his wife, "how the rain has run down those graves. You know, it's loosened Jim Sloan's stone so, I'm afraid it'll fall against the first heavy blow." Martha's exclamation "Oh!" recalled to him her presence. He stopped talking for a while, then hoping to blot out the effects of his statement he began a lively story of the number of trees that had fallen across the road, and how he had been told that over at Rampaco the post-office had been struck by lightning. He did not know it, but Martha was deaf to his reports. She had her own thoughts. She felt herself curiously strong of will, and there raced in her blood the high determination to act that very night. Not for nothing had she spent the rain drenched days in terrified silence in her room. All of her energies that were still capable of being mustered to her resolve, she had converted in the crucible of her will, and huddled in terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the touch of Jim--Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of him at the very source of his power over her. She would go that very night. She cast a glance toward the closet where Deems kept his trowel and chisel. She would have need of them, she knew. She said "Good night" rather more loudly and vehemently than she had intended, for she was feeling nervous. She was awakened by a feeling of cold. As she sat up she saw that the door was open. What was it drew her eyes through the hallway and out into the open and brought her up suddenly? There came upon her an eeriness that startled and chilled her, and suddenly, as if it were coming at her through the open door, fingers out-thrust, there appeared the hand. She was out of bed on the instant. Somehow in her throat she repressed the upstartled cry, "Jim," by an effort that strained all her nerves and ma
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