piece of bric-a-brac with her handkerchief, now taking a book from
one of the shelves in the library only to throw it down before
she read a page.

This house was queer. She would not have admitted it to Lizzie,
for her soul's salvation--but, for the first time in her sensible
life, she listened for creakings of woodwork, rustling of leaves,
stealthy steps outside, beyond the safe, bright squares of the
windows--for anything that was actual, tangible, not merely
formless fear.

"There's too much ROOM in the country for things to happen to you!"
she confided to herself with a shiver. "Even the night--whenever
I look out, it seems to me as if the night were ten times bigger and
blacker than it ever is in New York!"

To comfort herself she mentally rehearsed her telephone conversation
of the morning, the conversation she had not mentioned to her
household. At the time it had seemed to her most reassuring--the
plans she had based upon it adequate and sensible in the normal
light of day. But now the light of day had been blotted out and
with it her security. Her plans seemed weapons of paper against the
sinister might of the darkness beyond her windows. A little wind
wailed somewhere in that darkness like a beaten child--beyond the
hills thunder rumbled, drawing near, and with it lightning and the
storm.

She made herself sit down in the chair beside her favorite lamp on
the center table and take up her knitting with stiff fingers. Knit
two--purl two--Her hands fell into the accustomed rhythm