“Open, open!” shout I.  “What on earth is the matter?”

There is silence; then a man’s voice—­that is to say, my wife’s voice in imitation of a man’s—­replies in tones of indignant ferocity, to convey the idea of a life-preserver being under the pillow of the speaker, and ready to his hand:  “Who are you—­what do you want?”

“You very silly woman,” I answered; not from unpoliteness, but because I find that that sort of language recovers and assures her of my identity better than any other—­“why, it’s I.”

The door is then opened about six or seven inches, and I am admitted with all the precaution which attends the entrance of an ally into a besieged garrison.

Mrs. B., now leaning upon my shoulder, dissolves into copious tears, and points to the door communicating with my attiring-chamber.

“There’s sur—­sur—­somebody been snoring in your dressing-room,” she sobs, “all the time you were away.”

This statement is a little too much for my sense of humour, and although sympathising very tenderly with poor Mrs. B., I cannot help bursting into a little roar of laughter.  Laughter and fear are deadly enemies, and I can see at once that Mrs. B. is all the better for this explosion.

“Consider, my love,” I reason, “consider the extreme improbability of a burglar or other nefarious person making such a use of the few precious hours of darkness as to go to sleep in them!  Why, too, should he take a bedstead without a mattress, which I believe is the case in this particular supposition of yours, when there were feather-beds unoccupied in other apartments?  Moreover, would not this be a still greater height of recklessness in such an individual, should he have a habit of snor——­”

A slight noise in the dressing-room, occasioned by the Venetian blind tapping against the window, here causes Mrs. B. to bury her head with extreme swiftness, ostrichlike, beneath the pillow, so that the peroration of my argument is lost upon her.  I enter the suspected chamber—­this time with a lighted candle—­and find my trousers, with the boots in them, hanging over the bedside something after the manner of a drunken marauder, but nothing more.  Neither is there anybody reposing under the shadow of my boot-tree upon the floor.  All is peace there, and at sixes and sevens as I left it upon retiring—­as I had hoped—­to rest.

Once more I stretch my chilled and tired limbs upon the couch; sweet sleep once more begins to woo my eyelids, when “Henry, Henry!” again dissolves the dim and half-formed dream.

“Are you certain, Henry, that you looked in the shower-bath?  I am almost sure that I heard somebody pulling the string.”

No grounds, indeed, are too insufficient, no supposition too incompatible with reason, for Mrs. B. to build her alarms upon.  Sometimes, although we lodge upon the second story, she imagines that the window is being attempted; sometimes, although the register may be down, she is confident that the chimney is being used as the means of ingress.