With a shriek that tore a jagged rent through the darkness Mrs. Jett began pounding at the slippery flanks, her hands sliding off its shininess. "Out! Out! Henry, where are you? Help me! O God, don't let him get me. Take him away, Henry! Where are you? My hands--slippery! Where are you--" Stunned, feeling for her in the darkness, he wanted to take her shuddering form into his arms and waken her out of this horror, but with each groping move of his her hurtling shrieks came faster, and finally, dragging the bedclothing with her, she was down on the floor at the bedside, blobbering. That is the only word for it--blobbering. He found a light, and by this time there were already other lights flashing up in the startled household. When he saw her there in the ague of a huddle on the floor beside the bed, a cold sweat broke out over him so that he could almost feel each little explosion from the pores. "Why, Emmy--Emmy--my Emmy--my Emmy--" She saw him now and knew him, and tried in her poor and already burningly ashamed way to force her chattering jaws together. "Hen-ery--dream--bad--fish--Hen-ery--" He drew her up to the side of the bed, covering her shivering knees as she sat there, and throwing a blanket across her shoulders. Fortunately he was aware that the soothing note in his voice helped, and so he sat down beside her, stroking her hand, stroking, almost as if to hypnotize her into quiet. "Henry," she said, closing her fingers into his wrists, "I must have dreamed--a horrible dream. Get back to bed, dear. I--I don't know what ails me, waking up like that. That--fish! O God! Henry, hold me, hold me." He did, lulling her with a thousand repetitions of his limited store of endearments, and he could feel the jerk of sobs in her breathing subside and she seemed almost to doze, sitting there with her far hand across her body and up against his cheek. Then came knocks at the door, and hurried explanations through the slit that he opened, and Mrs. Peopping's eye close to the crack. "Everything is all right.... Just a little bad dream the missus had.... All right now.... To be expected, of course.... No, nothing anyone can do.... Good night. Sorry.... No, thank you. Everything is all right." The remainder of the night the Jetts kept a small light burning, after a while Henry dropping off into exhausted and heavy sleep. For hours Mrs. Jett lay staring at the small bud of light, no larger than a human eye. It seemed to stare back at her, warning, Now don't you go dropping off to sleep and misbehave again. And holding herself tense against a growing drowsiness, she didn't--for fear-- * * * * *