She knew not how she got up the stairs, how she burst into her chamber in the long corridor. Prance ought to have been there; but Prance was not: there was only the wood-fire in the grate; the two wax lights on the mantelpiece. And at the same moment she became conscious of hearing a strange noise; the wildest sounds that ever struck on the ear of man. They seemed to come from the street; the very air resounded with them; louder and louder they grew; loud enough to make a deaf man hear, to strike the most equable mind with a vague sense of momentary terror. The same basilisk impulse that had caused her to glance round on the staircase, drew her now to the window. She dashed it open and leaned out--perhaps for company in her desperate loneliness, poor thing! But--what was it she beheld? In all parts of the street, in every corner of it, distant, near, nearer, pouring into it from all directions, as if they were making for the hotel, as if they were making for _her_, flocking into it in crowds,--from the Place Jean Bart, from the Rue de l'Eglise, from the Rue Nationale, from the Rue David-d'Angers, from the Place Napoleon,--came shoals upon shoals of lighted churches, toys, similar to the one she had just seen below, to the one carried by that unfortunate child a year ago, at Alnwick. Of all sizes, of all forms, of various degrees of clearness and light, a few were red and a few were green, came on these conspicuous things: paper models of cottages, of houses, of towers, of lanterns, of castles, and many models of churches; on, on they pressed; accompanied by the horrible din of these hollow and unearthly sounds. With an awful cry, that was lost in the depths of the room--what could be heard amidst that discordant babel?--Mrs. St. John turned to fly, and fell to the floor in convulsions. She had only _imagined_ that she saw Benja in those previous nervous dreams of hers: now it seemed that the dream had passed into reality, and these were a thousand Benjas, in flesh and blood, come to mock at her.