We were alone, Bee and I; alone to wait. The mattress at my feet was empty. I heard a sound. I turned. In the leather chair beside me Bee was sobbing softly to herself. CHAPTER IV THE RETURN The hours seemed very long. A singular desire for silence had fallen upon us. For myself, and it is my thought that the same emotion lay upon Bee, there were a myriad questions upon which idly I would have spoken. Yet of themselves so horrible, so fearsome seemed their import that to voice them would have been frightening beyond endurance. Thus, we did not speak; save that at first I comforted Bee, clumsily as best I could, until at last she was calmer, smiling at me bravely, suggesting perhaps that I would sleep while she remained on watch. The clock ticked off its measured passing of the minutes. An hour. Then midnight. The window shade was flapping again with the night wind outside. I rose to close the sash, but Bee checked me. "He might want to come in that way. You understand, Rob--" Memory came to me of the half-materialized spectre of that Kansas farmhouse, that apparition so ponderable of substance that it must perforce escape by the opened window. I turned back to my chair. "Of course, Bee. I had forgotten." We spoke in hushed tones, as though unseen presences not to be disturbed were around us. Another hour. Throughout it all with half-closed eyes I lay back at physical ease in my chair, regarding the white walls of our little room so empty. We still kept the single dull light; dull, but it was enough to illuminate the solid floor, that starkly empty mattress, the white ceiling, the four walls, closed door at my side, the two windows, one of gently flapping shade. And as musingly I stared the sense of how constricted was my vision grew upon me. I could see a few feet to one blank wall or another, or to the ceiling above, the floor below, but no farther. Yet a while ago, following the retreat of those white apparitions, my sight had penetrated beyond the narrow confines of this room into distances illimitable. And to me then came a vague conception of the vast mystery that lay unseen about us, unseen until peopled by things visible to which our sight might cling. The realm of unthought things! Yet now I was struggling to think them. The realm of things unseen. Yet I had seen of them some little part. The wonder came to me then, were not perchance, unthought things non-existent until some mind had thought them, thus to bring them into being? Two o'clock. Then three. Five hours. He had said he might return in five hours. I stirred in my chair, and at once Bee moved to regard me. "He will be coming, soon," I said softly. "It is five hours, Bee." "Yes, he will be coming soon," she answered.