I began to get back to myself again.  I could feel my heart beating; I could hear the woeful moaning of the wind in the wood; I could leap up in bed, and give the alarm before she escaped from the house.  “Murder!  Wake up there!  Murder!”

Nobody answered to the alarm.  I rose and groped my way through the darkness to the door of the room.  By that way she must have got in.  By that way she must have gone out.

The door of the room was fast locked, exactly as I had left it on going to bed!  I looked at the window.  Fast locked too!

Hearing a voice outside, I opened the door.  There was the landlord, coming toward me along the passage, with his burning candle in one hand, and his gun in the other.

“What is it?” he says, looking at me in no very friendly way.

I could only answer in a whisper, “A woman, with a knife in her hand.  In my room.  A fair, yellow-haired woman.  She jabbed at me with the knife, twice over.”

He lifted his candle, and looked at me steadily from head to foot.  “She seems to have missed you—­twice over.”

“I dodged the knife as it came down.  It struck the bed each time.  Go in, and see.”

The landlord took his candle into the bedroom immediately.  In less than a minute he came out again into the passage in a violent passion.

“The devil fly away with you and your woman with the knife!  There isn’t a mark in the bedclothes anywhere.  What do you mean by coming into a man’s place and frightening his family out of their wits by a dream?”

A dream?  The woman who had tried to stab me, not a living human being like myself?  I began to shake and shiver.  The horrors got hold of me at the bare thought of it.

“I’ll leave the house,” I said.  “Better be out on the road in the rain and dark, than back in that room, after what I’ve seen in it.  Lend me the light to get my clothes by, and tell me what I’m to pay.”

The landlord led the way back with his light into the bedroom.  “Pay?” says he.  “You’ll find your score on the slate when you go downstairs.  I wouldn’t have taken you in for all the money you’ve got about you, if I had known your dreaming, screeching ways beforehand.  Look at the bed—­where’s the cut of a knife in it?  Look at the window—­is the lock bursted?  Look at the door (which I heard you fasten yourself)—­is it broke in?  A murdering woman with a knife in my house!  You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

My eyes followed his hand as it pointed first to the bed—­then to the window—­then to the door.  There was no gainsaying it.  The bed sheet was as sound as on the day it was made.  The window was fast.  The door hung on its hinges as steady as ever.  I huddled my clothes on without speaking.  We went downstairs together.  I looked at the clock in the bar-room.  The time was twenty minutes past two in the morning.  I paid my bill, and the landlord let me out.  The rain had ceased; but the night was dark, and the wind