Softly she opened the door and went inside. Something scurried off into a corner and she fancied it turned about there and watched her in the darkness. The room seemed hot and close and there was a rhythmic rise and fall like the rising and falling of some vast invisible bosom, oppressed. She tiptoed over to the far door and stood listening. Not a sound could she hear. Old Landy was most probably asleep in his bed in the room up over the stable. She balanced on her feet and stood waiting, in indecision. She could not go back, so she opened the door softly and peered in. A glaring white patch caught her eye. The moonlight through the window lay cold and bright upon the counterpane. Just above the patch was a jumble of shadows, from which protruded, bare and yellow and weazened, an arm. She caught her breath and fought down the sudden rising of her heart. It was nothing--only lying there so detached in the moonlight, thrust up out of the shadow out of nowhere, it did look gruesome, like something dead, something completely and irrevocably dead. It lay without a sign of movement, with the fingers slightly curled up under the palm and clutching at the coverlet. Gradually, her calm returning, she listened with her head thrust around the corner of the door, and directly she caught the very faint sound of breathing, a far-away, fine-drawn, eerie whisper. Slowly she backed away and closed the door. She groped over to a chair in the sitting room and sat down. Through the squares of the window panes she could see the milky white patches of moonlight flooding the world outside, and the silence came creeping up all around until it seemed to squeeze the very walls inward. "I wonder what's going on?" she thought. Because of its very soundlessness, the universe about her seemed to be teeming with vague suggestions. That distant clamour, the hurry of footsteps, and then Joe, slipping away from her into the shadow. And now the deathlike stillness. She began to rock slowly to and fro. With an effort of the will she forced herself to think of cheerful things, housework and cooking, and sunlight and people. Suddenly she realized that there was no reason for her sitting up. She might just as well go to bed. She started to her feet, but something held her, something forced her back into her chair. There had been footsteps fading off into the darkness. She must wait until they came back again--out of the darkness. Something in the idea strangely excited her, left her tense. In all this silence she knew she could not sleep; she would be lying there waiting, waiting for something, she knew not what. So she settled back and rocked and waited, staring with wide-open eyes at the steel-blue patch that was the door. And the night settled down and drew close to her with its uncertainties. Time passed.