When Hetty woke in the middle of the night, and found herself in darkness, without a glimmer of light, curtains and shutters closing her in, doors locked between her and all the rest of the world, a gloom which could be felt weighing down her eyelids, the sensation of terror which overwhelmed her was no doubt entirely unreasonable. Miss Hofland next door felt these precautions essential to her rest. But little Hetty lay not daring to breathe, bound in a speechless and horrible panic which no words could express. Nothing that she could have seen or heard would have equalled the horror of seeing nothing, of lying there a hopeless prisoner of the darkness, the silence throbbing round her, the gloom pressing upon her like a tangible weight. How she had woke, whether by the reverberation of some cry, or by some stirring in the night, she could not tell. She thought it was both. She thought that some shriek penetrating the too great and tingling profundity of silence, and some movement in the intense, insupportable gloom, had broken the uneasy sleep into which she had fallen against her will while the firelight lasted, with its friendly blaze and little crackling. These had saved her from the horror of the shut-up place. But now the fire had died out, there was no glimpse or glimmer anywhere; all was dark, dark, horrible, a blackness growing upon her, getting into her very soul. Something of the effect of a nightmare was in that horrible gloom. It seemed to hold her so that she could not move, and scarcely could breathe. There seemed no air, but only darkness, darkness within and around. Her eyes were useless to her, as if she had none; and her ears, which seemed strained and worn with the effort, were the only sentinels she had to warn her of any approaching evil, and tingled and throbbed, either they or that black vacancy which they watched. All this was nothing, as the reader knows, it was only a child’s fantastic rendering of the most common-place fact, but to Hetty it was a fever, a nightmare, everything that was most appalling. She started up at last, defying the still greater horror of meeting or running against some awful presence hidden in the gloom, and groped about the dreadful place till she found the curtains, restraining all the time with the most frantic effort a scream which was in her throat, which only the strongest resolution kept from bursting forth. When at last she had succeeded in opening everything, and discerned with transport a pale gleam of sky, with black tree-tops tossing about it, Hetty dropped upon the floor beside the window, almost fainting with exhaustion and relief. At last here was a little light, though it was only the glimmer of midnight. It was the sky; there was one faint star in it, shining by the edge of a cloud. She was not shut up in a box of blackness and darkness and separated from all the world.