The clock was striking eleven when quiet was at last restored, and the exhausted sufferer began to think of sleep.  At this moment she heard a sound before which her heart sank like lead.  You must know that Keturah has a very near neighbor, Miss Humdrum by name.  Miss Humdrum is a—­well, a very excellent and pious old lady, who keeps a one-eyed servant and three cats; and the sound which Keturah heard was Miss Humdrum’s cats.

Keturah descended to the wood-shed, armed herself with a huge oaken log, and sallied out into the garden, with a horrible sang-froid that only long familiarity with her errand could have engendered.  It was Egyptian darkness; but her practised eye discerned, or thought it discerned, a white cat upon the top of the high wooden fence.  Keturah smiled a ghastly smile, and fired.  Now she never yet in her life threw anything anywhere, under any circumstances, that did not go exactly in the opposite direction from what she wanted to have it.  This occasion proved no exception.  The cat jumped, and sprang over, and disappeared.  The stick went exactly into the middle of the fence.  Keturah cannot suppose that the last trump will be capable of making a louder noise.  She stood transfixed.  One cry alone broke the hideous silence.

“O Lord!” in an unmistakably Irish, half-wakened howl, from the open window of the one-eyed servant’s room.  “Only that, and nothing more.”

Keturah returned to her apartment, a sadder if not a wiser woman.  Marius among the ruins of Carthage, Napoleon at St. Helena, M’Clellan in Europe, have henceforth and forever her sympathy.

She thinks it was precisely five minutes after her return, during which the happy stillness that seemed to rest upon nature without and nature within had whispered faint promises of coming rest, that there suddenly broke upon it a hoarse, deep, unearthly breathing.  So hoarse, so deep, so unearthly, and so directly underneath her window, that for about ten seconds Keturah sat paralyzed.  There was but one thing it could be.  A travelling menagerie in town had lost its Polish wolf that very day.  This was the Polish wolf.

The horrible panting, like the panting of a famished creature, came nearer, grew louder, grew hoarser.  The animal had found a bone in the grass, and was crunching it in his ghastly way.  Then she could hear him sniffing at the door.

And Amram’s room was on the lower story!  Perhaps wolves climbed in at windows!

The awful thought roused Keturah from the stupor of her terror.  She was no coward.  She would face the fearful sight.  She would call and warn him at any risk.  She faltered out upon the balcony.  She leaned over the railing.  She gazed breathlessly down into the darkness.

A cow.

Another cow.

Three cows.

Keturah sat down on the window-sill in the calm of despair.