She lay silent, hoping he would think she was asleep, not making a sound.

“I do want to see ’ee that bad,” came the voice.  She paid no heed, but clenched her hands under the bedclothes; her heart had settled into an even thunderous beating that to her ears almost deafened the voice that provoked its action.

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” went on the voice.  “Won’t ’ee just say good-bye to I?  I’m going to another world this time, not to Australy or Californy.  I can’t stand life any longer, Phoebe; you’ll just wish I a good journey for the last?  ’Tes a hard voyage, I fear.”

Her self-control broke; she could no longer hold her tongue, a sick belief in his words struggling with the conviction, born of her wish, that he would never carry out his threat.

“Go away, Archelaus!  I wish you’d go away and leave me in peace.  I don’t believe you’ll do no such wickedness; you’re only trying to frighten me, and it’s wicked, with me so near my time and no one with me.  Go away, Archelaus!”

“You don’t believe me ...?  Just lie there in your soft bed and listen, then,” said Archelaus through the door.  “You’ll soon knaw whether I’m a man to be believed or not.  Good-bye, lil’ Phoebe!”

She heard him go downstairs, caught the well-known creak of two of them—­one at the top, the other near the bottom, which always creaked; she could gauge his descent by them.  Then came the harder ring of his boots upon the nags of the passage.  Then for a while all was quiet, while she lay with straining ears trying to ignore the sound of her own heart that she might better hear any sounds below.

Upon her incredulous senses came a faint scrabbling noise, a scuffling sound, clearly audible through the old worn boarding of the floor; it was followed by the sharp clatter of an overturned chair.  Then came to her a noise so often described by him that for one moment it seemed she had heard it before, as sometimes in a day after a vivid dream the events dreamed of seem for an irrational recurring moment actually to have happened.  A noise of choking....

It went on and on, a sound no acting could have counterfeited—­a wild choking, a frenzy of protest made by compressed lungs and windpipe.  The choking went on and then grew fainter; at last it died away.  Phoebe lay soaked in sweat, her hands clutching the side of the bed, her rising beats of pulses and heart confusing the sense of sound so much that she hardly knew when the suggestive noise from below had really ceased.

It might have only been a few minutes she stayed there, it might have been an hour or more, for all she could have told; but at last, driven by her fear, she half-fell from the bed and found the door.  She drew the bolt with fingers that did not feel it, opened the door, and crept to the head of the stairs.  Not a sound came up to her.  She put one bare foot forward, drew it back, then impelled by something stronger