The catch of the door opening into the house was weak and, suddenly, the long passage that began at the kitchen and ended at the justice-room, was filled with whispering sounds. A breeze, wandering in, had lost itself in the darkness. It pulled at the handle until Leadville, sitting forward, his head sunk between his shoulders in the attitude of a bird of prey, his mind concentrated on the approaching and dreadful and longed-for end, looked up. For him the breeze was winged with fear. He fancied that the handle moved. Could Sabina be coming back for something she had forgotten? She had a fancy that she suffered from cold feet, that she must have a flagon of hot water in the bed. To Leadville this fancy had seemed part of her general unreasonableness. "Yer laigs are gone," he had said irritably. "As long as they’re above ground-’they bain’t gone." "Any’ow you can’t ’av cold feet." "I tell yer, I can’t sleep for ’em." "Well, what’s the good of a ’ot jar at the bottom of the bed when you’m to the top?" "I put the bottle," she had said obstinately, "where I feel my feet’s to. That’s where I feel cold." He remembered to have seen on the linhay shelf the old Hollands jar which was used as a hot-water bottle. Was she returning to fetch it? Was it her fingers that were moving the little brass door-knob? His fear grew until it mastered him. He had done with Sabina and she must not come back. He could not stand it. If she swung in on that loathly trolly and began to potter about, heating water, looking for the flagon, he felt that some containing wall would bulge and give and what was held up by it fall into the open. "I should ’av to tell her," he said, staring at the handle. "Shouldn’t be able to keep it in. ’Twould be out of me mouth before I knawed." On that coast a gale may be blowing great guns one moment and the next drop into silence. The land wind which had piled cove and bay with the welcome oreweed had died down during the day and, out of the north, had come a flock of small white clouds. They trailed on their unknown errand across the sky and behind them, like a sheep-dog, ran a fitful wind. It sang in the ears of the old house and Leadville, made aware of it, turned his eyes contemptuously from the spasmodically moving door-knob. "That’s only the wind," he muttered. The rocky shelf on which Wastralls was built, lying behind Dark Head and lower than the ridges of the valley, lay also below the wind. A thickness on the turning earth it lay in an unnatural hush. On the beaches the tides roared and thundered. Above, but divided from the homestead by wide, clean, moonlighted space, the winds shrieked a warning; but the house, except for that one breath of disturbed and whispering sound, was very still. It kept a vigil. Byron, motionless in Old Squire’s chair, knew that he too was waiting.