took on a sinister complexion
in the watches of the night. The loneliness of the place, its distance
from every habitation--details to which I held no special distaste
before--got hideously upon my nerves at last. Supposing anything
happened, in what a position did we three women stand! What chance was
there of help?

In my mind I surveyed the prospect from my window. The trackless Denes,
the wild, unfriendly sea. Shuddering, I turned mentally to the outlook
from Julia's room. What of reassuring was there in the rudiments of an
unlighted road across a desert of ugly waste lands?

I was thinking of the road, I suppose, when at last I fell on sleep;
for my dream was a nightmare of toiling over it with Julia, in a
frantic attempt to escape from some horror, none the less terrible for
being undefined, ever close upon our heels.

It was some disturbing but uncertain sound that wakened me from this
dreaming to an inner dream. Just a vision, seen in a flash and gone, of
two men standing in a light thrown from an upper window, and looking up
to it.

From this apparition so vividly presented to my brain, I was awakened
by a repetition of the disturbing sound, soft but distinct now. I flew
up in bed with a beating heart and the certainty that someone,
somewhere, had thrown a clod of earth at a window--not mine; at the
back of the house; Julia's, or Mrs Ragg's.

A minute, and I was out of my bed and into Julia's room. I laid a hand
on my sister's shoulder. "Julia," I whispered, "wake up. I've had such
horrible dreams."

The candle I held in a shaking hand showed the glinting green of
Julia's eyes within their half-opened lids. "I'm so comfy," she
muttered; "I'm having such a lovely sleep. Go back to bed, Isabella."

But I crept into Julia's bed, instead, and clasped her close for the
comfort of her presence.

"I dreamt two men were looking up at a window," I said, "--do keep
awake, Julia. I don't know why it seemed so horrid--nothing has ever
seemed so horrid before. And--you're going off to sleep again,
Julia!--you must listen!--someone flung something at a window. That was
not a dream. I heard it quite distinctly."

"It wasn't at this window," Julia declared, in muffled tones. "What a
nuisance you are, Isabella."

Then in an instant she flung off her sleep and was out of bed. "It must
have been at Mrs Ragg's," she said. "I am going to see."

Shivering, I followed to the landing. The light no longer showed from
Mrs