telephone ring and Veronica answer it? Had hearing played some bizarre
trick on her? She seemed to be perfectly awake and in her right mind in
other respects. The girls had evidently not noticed anything peculiar
about her actions when she came out of the house, not even Nyoda, the
sharp sighted. Clearly she had not been walking in her sleep. She had
certainly heard the telephone ring; she had certainly heard Veronica
answer it. She had understood every word she had said perfectly; the
hall had been absolutely still. And yet--she had not heard Veronica go
out of either door! She remembered that distinctly, but her first
impulse had been to wait until Veronica had gone out of the front door
and then look after her. It was impossible not to have heard the front
door open; one hinge was rusty and it emitted a dismal squeak every time
the door opened. But if she had gone out of the back door the others
would have seen her and would not have said that she was upstairs in her
room. That was the point which made Sahwah doubt her own memory.
Veronica had not left the house; she must have gone right upstairs. And
she must have said something else through the telephone and Sahwah's
ears had played her a trick. It was easy to have missed her in her
search through the big house; Sahwah had merely run into one room after
another, given a hasty glance around and then run on to the next.

Sahwah smoothed the brown satiny forehead lovingly, and laughed at
herself for a suspicious idiot. And yet, the occurrence would not go
from her mind, and she wakened in the night to think about it hour after
hour and when she did sleep she was oppressed with a constant feeling of
uneasiness, and woke again and again with that sense of groping after
something that had just occurred, but which had escaped her utterly.

Then the next morning her doubts all vanished once more when the
Winnebagos assembled on the front lawn for flag raising, and Veronica,