Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/49

 I think you. . . you and Aunt Cassie know well enough what it is."

Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated, among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had not followed her in more than fifteen years.

Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the darkness, listening, listening, listening. . . . There was at first no sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been as strong as O'Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon whom she had met once for a little while at Sabine's house in Paris.

The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed in the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of fierce tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever dying away. For more than three years she had never once entered this room free from the terror that there might only be silence to welcome her. And at last, after she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she was wakened sharply by another sound, quite different, the sound of a wild, almost human cry. . . savage and wicked, and followed by the thud thud of hoofs beating savagely against the walls of a stall, and then the