ut neither the next evening, which was Friday, nor for Fridays
thereafter, would she venture down for fish dinner, dining cozily up
in her room off milk toast and a fluffy meringue dessert prepared
especially by Mrs. Plush. It was floating-island night downstairs.

Henry puzzled a bit over the Fridays. It was his heaviest day at the
business, and it was upsetting to come home tired and feel her place
beside him at the basement dinner table vacant.

But the women's nods were more knowing than ever, the reassuring
insinuations more and more delicate.

But one night, out of one of those stilly cisterns of darkness that
between two and four are deepest with sleep, Henry was awakened on the
crest of such a blow and yell that he swam up to consciousness in a
ready-made armor of high-napped gooseflesh.

A regrettable thing had happened. Awakened, too, on the high tide of
what must have been a disturbing dream, Mrs. Jett flung out her arm as
if to ward off something. That arm encountered Henry, snoring lightly in
his sleep at her side. But, unfortunately, to that frightened fling of
her arm Henry did not translate himself to her as Henry.

That was a fish lying there beside her! A man-sized fish with its mouth
jerked open to the shape of a gasp and the fillip still through its
enormous body, as if its flanks were uncomfortably dry. A fish!

With a shriek that tore a jagged rent through the darkness Mrs. Jett
began pounding at the slippery flanks, her hands sliding off its
shininess.

"Out! Out! Henry, where are you? Help me! O God, don't let him get me.
Take him away, Henry! Where are you? My hands--slippery! Where are
you--"

Stunned, feeling for her in the darkness, he wanted to take her
shuddering form into his arms and waken her out of this horror, but with
each groping move of his her hurtling shrieks came faster, and finally,
dragging the bedclothing with her, she was down on the floor at the
bedside, blobbering. That is the only word for it--blobbering.

He found a light, and by this time there were already other lights
flashing up in the startled household. When he saw her there in the ague
of a huddle on the floor beside the bed, a cold sweat broke out over him
so that he could almost feel each little explosion from the pores.

"Why, Emmy--Emmy--my Emmy--my Emmy--"

She saw him now and knew him, and tried in her poor and already
burningly ashamed way to force her chattering jaws together.

"Hen-ery--dream