Then she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air blow in too fresh and keen.  She put the candle where it could not reach him.  The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a little, but all through her under-being ran the warnings of a curious alarm.  And it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand and pulling the string of the blind with the other, that her husband sat up again in bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly audible.  The eyes had opened wide again.  He pointed.  She stood stock still and listened, her shadow distorted on the blind.  He did not come out towards her as at first she feared.

The whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too, beyond all she had ever known.

“They are roaring in the Forest further out... and I... must go and see.”  He stared beyond her as he said it, to the woods.  “They are needing me.  They sent for me....”  Then his eyes wandering back again to things within the room, he lay down, his purpose suddenly changed.  And that change was horrible as well, more horrible, perhaps, because of its revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her.

The singular phrase chilled her blood, for a moment she was utterly terrified.  That tone of the somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked.  Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it.  She leaned against the window-sill, shaking in every limb.  She had an awful feeling for a moment that something was coming in to fetch him.

“Not yet, then,” she heard in a much lower voice from the bed, “but later.  It will be better so...  I shall go later....”

The words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her so long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to have brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to think about.  They gave it form; they brought it closer; they sent her thoughts to her Deity in a wild, deep prayer for help and guidance.  For here was a direct, unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes and claims her husband recognized while he kept them almost wholly to himself.

By the time she reached his side and knew the comfort of his touch, the eyes had closed again, this time of their own accord, and the head lay calmly back upon the pillows.  She gently straightened the bed clothes.  She watched him for some minutes, shading the candle carefully with one hand.  There was a smile of strangest peace upon the face.

Then, blowing out the candle, she knelt down and prayed before getting back into bed.  But no sleep came to her.  She lay awake all night thinking, wondering, praying, until at length with the chorus of the birds and the glimmer of the dawn upon the green blind, she fell into a slumber of complete exhaustion.

But while she slept the wind continued roaring in the Forest further out.  The sound came closer—­sometimes very close indeed.