hand, no longer overcome by mortal
terror, yet somehow reluctant once more to look out and to see once
more--nothing. There was a sound outside the door, louder, hoarser than
the faint sob or sigh which he had heard before, and he seized the lamp
and turned towards it. Before he had made a step forward, the door was
pushed violently back and his wife came in, leaning upon it as though
she needed support. She was barefooted and dressed only in a long
night-gown, white, yet hardly whiter than her face. Her eyes did not
turn towards him, they stared in front of her, not with the fixed gaze
of an ordinary sleep-walker, but with purpose and intensity. She seemed
to see something, to pursue something, with starting eyes and
out-stretched arms; something she hated even more than she feared it,
for her lips were blanched and tightened over her teeth as though with
fury, and her smooth white forehead gathered in a frown. Again she
uttered that low, fierce sound, like that he had heard outside the door.
Then, loosing the handle on which she had leaned, she half sprung, half
staggered, with uplifted hand, towards an open window, beyond which the
rush of the thunder shower was just visible, sloping pallidly across the
darkness. She leaned out into it and uttered to the night a hoarse,
confused voice, words inchoate, incomprehensible, yet with a terrible
accent of rage, of malediction. This transformation of his wife, so
refined, so self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost
animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a
phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he
had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank
rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate--"My husband!
Mine! Mine!"--but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words
as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she drooped, half
kneeling on the deep window-seat, half fallen across the sill. He sprang
to catch her, but not before her forehead had come down sharply on the
stone edge of the outer window. He kneeled upon the window-seat and
gathered her gently in his arms, where she lay quiet, but moaning and
shuddering.

"My husband!" she wailed, no longer furious now but despairing. "Ian! My
love! Ian! My life!--my life! My own husband!"

Even in this moment it thrilled him to hear such words from her lips. He
had not thought she loved him so passionately. H