it was certainly lighter, she could distinguish the vine-branches
against her window. The muffled bark of lugubrious timbre came again
and again, deadened by distance and doors. The shock of the first
outburst--her heart had seemed to roll over--had plunged Celia into
what we call, when children suffer it, a fit of the horrors.
Twitching, she sat up again, and receiving from Beech's voice, as his
angry barks multiplied, a message of warning, she kept her eyes
instinctively fixed upon the square of light.

She slept on the ground-floor, and a garden-walk passed under her
window. A figure now darkened it. It could hardly be said that she was
frightened, she seemed to have turned to stone. Some one tapped, then
stood peering in and making signs. As she did not stir, the tapping
was repeated, urgent and more urgent. She arose and with less
astonishment than seemed explicable, recognized Judith Bray, who
whispered gaspingly, "Let me in, let me in--you must!" At this point
was entered by Celia a quite different phase of sensation. Now that
there seemed to be something to do, a call upon her for she as yet did
not know what, her nerve got back its tensest steadiness, her mind its
calm,--she was the effective daughter of a long line of effective
people.

She had signed the auroral intruder to a side-entrance, the furthest
from the sleepers in the house, and when they had tiptoed back to her
own chamber and noiselessly closed its door, she re-entered her bed,
being conscious in an undercurrent fashion of cold. As her eyes
consulted Judith, the livid atmosphere in which her bad dreams had
been enacting themselves through the night was shot with sanguine.
Judith's face prepared the mind for revelations which should smother.
That touch of excess which, however expressed, had always been an
element in the repugnance with which she inspired Celia, showed itself
now in a haggardness beyond all one could conceive a person achieving
in the brief space since the girl had been seen at the gate of her
garden jesting with the passers. She was bareheaded; the wide hood of
a travelling-cape, which had perhaps replaced her hat, lay back, and
her blown hair made a great wreath to her bloodless face. Her
breathing spoke of a merciless excitement driving her heart.

Celia sat up and clasped her knees with cramped fingers, pale with the
gray pallor of the dawn, in which her long coppery hair was just
beginning to glimmer a little--with the gilt