She felt easier, but there was the same horrid recurrence three times that week.  Once during an evening of lotto down in the front parlor she pushed back from the table suddenly, hand flashing up to her throat.

“Em!” said Mr. Jett, who was calling the numbers.

“It’s nothing,” she faltered, and then, regaining herself more fully, “nothing,” she repeated, the roundness out in her voice this time.

The women exchanged knowing glances.

“She’s all right,” said Mrs. Peopping, omnipotently.  “Those things pass.”

Going upstairs that evening, alone in the hallway, they flung an arm each across the other’s shoulder, crowding playfully up the narrow flight.

“Emmy,” he said, “poor Em, everything will be all right.”

She restrained an impulse to cry.  “Poor nothing,” she said.

But neither the next evening, which was Friday, nor for Fridays thereafter, would she venture down for fish dinner, dining cozily up in her room off milk toast and a fluffy meringue dessert prepared especially by Mrs. Plush.  It was floating-island night downstairs.

Henry puzzled a bit over the Fridays.  It was his heaviest day at the business, and it was upsetting to come home tired and feel her place beside him at the basement dinner table vacant.

But the women’s nods were more knowing than ever, the reassuring insinuations more and more delicate.

But one night, out of one of those stilly cisterns of darkness that between two and four are deepest with sleep, Henry was awakened on the crest of such a blow and yell that he swam up to consciousness in a ready-made armor of high-napped gooseflesh.

A regrettable thing had happened.  Awakened, too, on the high tide of what must have been a disturbing dream, Mrs. Jett flung out her arm as if to ward off something.  That arm encountered Henry, snoring lightly in his sleep at her side.  But, unfortunately, to that frightened fling of her arm Henry did not translate himself to her as Henry.

That was a fish lying there beside her!  A man-sized fish with its mouth jerked open to the shape of a gasp and the fillip still through its enormous body, as if its flanks were uncomfortably dry.  A fish!

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.