the candle was out,
and the room was plunged in pitch darkness.

The one impression which the absence of light immediately produced on
his mind was distrust of the curtained bed--distrust which shaped
itself into no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough, in its very
vagueness, to bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast,
and to set him listening intently. No sound stirred in the room, but the
familiar sound of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now
than he had heard it yet.

Still the vague distrust, the inexpressible dread possessed him, and
kept him in his chair. He had put his carpet-bag on the table when he
first entered the room, and he now took the key from his pocket, reached
out his hand softly, opened the bag, and groped in it for his traveling
writing-case, in which he knew that there was a small store of matches.
When he had got one of the matches he waited before he struck it on the
coarse wooden table, and listened intently again without knowing why.
Still there was no sound in the room but the steady, ceaseless rattling
sound of the rain.

He lighted the candle again without another moment of delay, and, on the
instant of its burning up, the first object in the room that his eyes
sought for was the curtained bed.

Just before the light had been put out he had looked in that direction,
and had seen no change, no disarrangement of any sort in the folds of
the closely-drawn curtains.

When he looked at the bed now, he saw hanging over the side of it a long
white hand.

It lay perfectly motionless midway on the side of the bed, where the
curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met. Nothing more was
visible. The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.

He stood looking at it, unable to stir, unable to call out--feeling
nothing, knowing nothing--every faculty he possessed gathered up and
lost in the one seeing faculty. How long that first panic held him he
never could tell afterward. It might have been only for a moment--it
might have been for many minutes together. How he got to the
bed--whether he ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly;
how he wrought himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never
has remembered, and never will remember to his dying day. It is enough
that he did go to the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.

The man had moved. One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was
turned