“I’ll come with you, Bill—­to the next floor,” she broke the silence.  “Then I’ll stay with Mabel—­till you come up again.”  The blind sank down with a long sigh as she said it.

The question jumped to my lips before I could repress it: 

“Mabel is awake.  She heard it too?”

I hardly know why horror caught me at her answer.  All was so vague and terrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister house where nothing ever happened.

“We met in the passage.  She was on her way to me.”

What shook in me, shook inwardly.  Frances, I mean, did not see it.  I had the feeling just that the Noise was upon us, that any second it would boom and roar about our ears.  But the deep silence held.  I only heard my sister’s little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question: 

“Then what is Mabel doing now?”

And her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadful tension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence.  With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplessly at me like a child: 

“She is weeping and gna—­”

My expression must have stopped her.  I believe I clapped both hands upon her mouth, though when I realized things clearly again, I found they were covering my own ears instead.  It was a moment of unutterable horror.  The revulsion I felt was actually physical.  It would have given me pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the air above my head; the sound—­a definite, wholesome sound that explained itself—­would have been a positive relief.  Other feelings, though, were in me too, all over me, rushing to and fro.  It was vain to seek their disentanglement; it was impossible.  I confess that I experienced, among them, a touch of paralyzing fear—­though for a moment only; it passed as sharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the face such as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspiration over the entire body.  Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinary personal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury.  It was, rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking—­a sympathetic shrinking—­from the agony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt for themselves.  The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in that instant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery torture of the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered....  It was of incredible power.  It was real.  The vain, intolerable hope swept over me.

I mastered myself, though hardly knowing how, and took my sister’s hand.  It was as cold as ice, as I led her firmly to the door and out into the passage.  Apparently she noticed nothing of my so near collapse, for I caught her whisper as we went.  “You are brave, Bill; splendidly brave.”