Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/267

 A Thief in the Night

By Marion Hepworth Dixon

had watched the huge rectangular shadow of the water-jug on the ceiling for over an hour and three-quarters, and still the nightlight on the washstand burnt uneasily on to the accompaniment of her husband's heavy breathing. The room had loomed black and foreboding on blowing out the candles an hour or two ago, but now the four white walls, hung here and there with faded family photographs, grew strangely luminous as her eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness. Yet shifting from left to right, and again from right to left on the tepid pillows, the outlines of the unfamiliar room gained no sort of familiarity as the hours wore on, but remained as blank and unmeaning as the house of death itself.

The silence alone was terrible, speaking as it did of the austere silence of the death-chamber below—a chamber where a white figure, once her husband s brother, lay stretched in awful rigidity on the bed.

The October night was dank, the atmosphere numb and heavy. As the roar of London died in the larger and enwrapping silences, the crack of a piece of furniture or the tapping of a withered leaf on the window-pane grew to be signs portentous and uncanny.

Yet, turning and twisting on the rumpled sheet, every moment sleep