Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/150

138 “A visitor! Emily! And you’re alive to tell the tale! And let me sleep on! And never tried to wake me!”

“At the beginning I was too much afraid, and afterwards I couldn’t.”

“Who was the visitor?”

“Well, that’s more than I can tell you, except that it was a woman.”

“A woman—Emily—came in here after I had gone to sleep! Don’t you see, or if you can’t see, can’t you feel that I’m on tenterhooks? Will you go on, or must I take you by the shoulders and shake it out of you?”

I told her what there was to tell, in the dark. She stood close up to me. As she said, I could feel she was on tenterhooks. She gripped me with her hands, as if she were unwilling to let there be so much as an inch of space between us, for fear of losing a syllable of what I had to say. As the interest increased her grasp tightened. Yet when I had to stop and tell her that she was pinching me black and blue, she resented my remonstrance as if it had been an unnecessary interruption of my narration. She could not have been more unreasonable had she tried. And to crown it all, so soon as I had finished she professed to doubt me.

“You’re sure you’ve been telling me just exactly what took place. I know your taste for the romantic.”

“I’ve been telling you nothing but the sober facts.”

“Sober, you call them? Staggering facts they seem to me. But why didn’t you ask the creature who she was?”

“Don’t I tell you that I did? And she replied that she was a daughter of the gods, and held life and death in her hand.”

“Is that so? She must have been a oner. Emily,