It was some disturbing but uncertain sound that wakened me from this dreaming to an inner dream. Just a vision, seen in a flash and gone, of two men standing in a light thrown from an upper window, and looking up to it. From this apparition so vividly presented to my brain, I was awakened by a repetition of the disturbing sound, soft but distinct now. I flew up in bed with a beating heart and the certainty that someone, somewhere, had thrown a clod of earth at a window--not mine; at the back of the house; Julia's, or Mrs Ragg's. A minute, and I was out of my bed and into Julia's room. I laid a hand on my sister's shoulder. "Julia," I whispered, "wake up. I've had such horrible dreams." The candle I held in a shaking hand showed the glinting green of Julia's eyes within their half-opened lids. "I'm so comfy," she muttered; "I'm having such a lovely sleep. Go back to bed, Isabella." But I crept into Julia's bed, instead, and clasped her close for the comfort of her presence. "I dreamt two men were looking up at a window," I said, "--do keep awake, Julia. I don't know why it seemed so horrid--nothing has ever seemed so horrid before. And--you're going off to sleep again, Julia!--you must listen!--someone flung something at a window. That was not a dream. I heard it quite distinctly." "It wasn't at this window," Julia declared, in muffled tones. "What a nuisance you are, Isabella." Then in an instant she flung off her sleep and was out of bed. "It must have been at Mrs Ragg's," she said. "I am going to see." Shivering, I followed to the landing. The light no longer showed from Mrs Ragg's door, but the door itself was still ajar. Julia rapped sharply upon it and called the caretaker's name. When no one answered, she pushed the door wide, and we saw, by the light of the candle I carried, that the room was empty. I scarcely knew why the fact that it was so filled us both with such dismay. Our faces were white in the candlelight as we looked blankly at each other; then, seizing hands, we scurried back to Julia's room. A rush of cold air met us on the landing and our light went out. "An outer door is open," Julia said. We shut and locked our own door and stood together in the darkness, gripping each other, intently listening. Julia's senses are sharper than mine. "Someone is in the garden--at the back," she whispered. "I can hear footsteps--footsteps of more than one person. What shall we do, Isabella? I don't know yet what we ought to do." Presently we were kneeling at the window. The moon had set, the night was quite dark. By degrees, straining our eyes in desperate anxiety, we made out the stunted form of a shrub or two planted opposite the house; we knew that the blackness of shadow at our left was the shed whose key had been lost.