Prayers had always been in the chapel at St. Susanna’s, and the girls had worn their black veils. But she dared not think of that, either—not to-night, when she was so alone.

She crossed the big room and opened a French window, pushed resolutely on the heavy shutters beyond,[36] and hinged them back. The night was moonless, starless, and dark, and filled with the troubled creaking and rushing of branches and the steady crashing of the sea. The girl could not distinguish where the garden ended and the wide surface of the moving waters began, but these had been her loved and familiar companions from babyhood, and she felt nothing but a restful sense of being home again when she heard their voices.

[36]

A current of cool moving air stirred the room, the bureau gas-jet wavered and went out, and Gabrielle, used to electric lighting, laughed nervously and aloud as she turned back to grope once more for matches.

But turning on the narrow iron balcony her eyes were arrested by the great eastern façade of Wastewater, of which her windows were a part. It loomed in the night a shadow just a little blacker than the prevailing dark; her own room was in a corner, next came a deep angle, like the three sides of a court, and then the northern wing, where seamstresses and house servants and coachmen, ladies’ maids and valets, agents delayed overnight, all sorts of odd and inconsiderable gentry had been lodged in Wastewater’s days of glory, years before.

Gabrielle stared oddly at this wing for a few moments, looked back into her own room. There was no light behind her to be caught in a distant window and reflect itself like another light.

Her heart began to beat strong and fast. In the opposite wing, across the wide blackness of the court, in another corner room at the level of her own room—there was certainly a light. Gabrielle felt a sense of utter and unreasoning terror, she did not know why. She stared in a sort of horrified fascination at the yellow[37] glints of light behind the shutter, her breath coming hard, one hand clutching her heart.

[37]

“David!” she whispered. Then frightened by her own voice she stumbled madly back in the dark, groping for gas fixtures, for matches, lighting her bedside lamp with shaking fingers, and springing in under the blankets with a long shudder of fear.

Safe—of course! But for a long time her heart did 

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