e Mr. Reynolds and the Ladleys
each a lamp. I sat in the back room that I had made into a temporary
kitchen, with a candle, and with a bedquilt around my shoulders. The
water rose fast in the lower hall, but by midnight, at the seventh
step, it stopped rising and stood still. I always have a skiff during
the flood season, and as the water rose, I tied it to one spindle of
the staircase after another.

I made myself a cup of tea, and at one o'clock I stretched out on a
sofa for a few hours' sleep. I think I had been sleeping only an hour
or so, when some one touched me on the shoulder and I started up. It
was Mr. Reynolds, partly dressed.

"Some one has been in the house, Mrs. Pitman," he said. "They went
away just now in the boat."

"Perhaps it was Peter," I suggested. "That dog is always wandering
around at night."

"Not unless Peter can row a boat," said Mr. Reynolds dryly.

I got up, being already fully dressed, and taking the candle, we went
to the staircase. I noticed that it was a minute or so after two
o'clock as we left the room. The boat was gone, not untied, but cut
loose. The end of the rope was still fastened to the stair-rail. I sat
down on the stairs and looked at Mr. Reynolds.

"It's gone!" I said. "If the house catches fire, we'll have to drown."

"It's rather curious, when you consider it." We both spoke softly, not
to disturb the Ladleys. "I've been awake, and I heard no boat come
in. And yet, if no one came in a boat, and came from the street, they
would have had to swim in."

I felt queer and creepy. The street door was open, of course, and the
lights going beyond. It gave me a strange feeling to sit there in
the darkness on the stairs, with the arch of the front door like the
entrance to a cavern, and see now and then a chunk of ice slide into
view, turn around in the eddy, and pass on. It was bitter cold, too,
and the wind was rising.

"I'll go through the house," said Mr. Reynolds. "There's likely
nothing worse the matter than some drunken mill-hand on a vacation
while the mills are under water. But I'd better look."

He left me, and I sat there alone in the darkness. I had a
presentiment of something wrong, but I tried to think it was only
discomfort and the cold. The water, driven in by the wind, swirled at
my feet. And something dark floated in and lodged on the step below. I
reached down and touched it. It was a dead kitten. I had never known a
dead cat to bring me anything but ba