“I don’t think I ever had a moment’s doubt that my parents both lay dead on the floor of that great room. When I came to myself--which may have been soon, and may not have been for a long while--the lightning had ceased to flash, leaving the darkness stretching like a blank pall between me and that spot in which were concentrated all the terrors of which my imagination was capable. I dared not enter it. I dared not take one step that way. My instinct was to fly and hide my trembling body again in my own bed; and associated with this, in fact dominating it and making me old before my time, was another--never to tell; never to let any one, least of all my grandfather--know what that forbidden room now contained. I felt in an irresistible sort of way that my father’s and mother’s honour was at stake. Besides, terror held me back; I felt that I should die if I spoke. Childhood has such terrors and such heroisms. Silence often covers in such, abysses of thought and feeling which astonish us in later years. There is no suffering like a child’s, terrified by a secret which it dare not for some reason disclose. “Events aided me. When, in desperation to see once more the light and all the things which linked me to life--my little bed, the toys on the window-sill, my squirrel in its cage--I forced myself to retraverse the empty house, expecting at every turn to hear my father’s voice or come upon the image of my mother--yes, such was the confusion of my mind, though I knew well enough even then that they were dead and that I should never hear the one or see the other. I was so benumbed with the cold in my half-dressed condition, that I woke in a fever next morning after a terrible dream which forced from my lips the cry of ‘Mother! Mother!’--only that.