. Not knowing what she meant to do, but
meaning to preserve him or be killed herself, she staggered forward and
looked in.

What sight was that which met her view!

The bed had not been lain on, but was smooth and empty. And at a table
sat the old man himself; the only living creature there; his white face
pinched and sharpened by the greediness which made his eyes unnaturally
bright--counting the money of which his hands had robbed her.

CHAPTER 31

With steps more faltering and unsteady than those with which she had
approached the room, the child withdrew from the door, and groped her
way back to her own chamber. The terror she had lately felt was
nothing compared with that which now oppressed her. No strange robber,
no treacherous host conniving at the plunder of his guests, or stealing
to their beds to kill them in their sleep, no nightly prowler, however
terrible and cruel, could have awakened in her bosom half the dread
which the recognition of her silent visitor inspired. The grey-headed
old man gliding like a ghost into her room and acting the thief while
he supposed her fast asleep, then bearing off his prize and hanging
over it with the ghastly exultation she had witnessed, was
worse--immeasurably worse, and far more dreadful, for the moment, to
reflect upon--than anything her wildest fancy could have suggested.
If he should return--there was no lock or bolt upon the door, and if,
distrustful of having left some money yet behind, he should come back
to seek for more--a vague awe and horror surrounded the idea of his
slinking in again with stealthy tread, and turning his face toward the
empty bed, while she shrank down close at his feet to avoid his touch,
which was almost insupportable. She sat and listened. Hark! A
footstep on the stairs, and now the door was slowly opening. It was
but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay,
it was worse, for the reality would have come and gone, and there an
end, but in imagination it was always coming, and never went away.

The feeling which beset the child was one of dim uncertain horror. She
had no fear of the dear old grandfather, in whose love for her this
disease of the brain had been engendered; but the man she had seen that
night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking in her room, and counting
the money by the glimmering light, seemed like another creature in his
shape, a monstrous distortion of his image, a something to