She could not find the handle;
something hung over it. Thinking coolly, she fancied the thing must be a
gown or dressing-gown; it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of the
touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk, and she felt at it
very carefully and mechanically, saying within herself, in her anxiety
to pass it without noise, 'If I should awake poor Chloe, of all people!'
Her alarm was that the door might creak. Before any other alarm had
struck her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth gaped,
her throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the effort to
swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation while she
felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh, ready to
shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round white
top. Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm too!
this was an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her. She
pulled it to release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a lump
descended, and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her that a
dead human body was upon her.
At a quarter to four o'clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish
relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman's voice, in
piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which
were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep,
in obedience to the summons of young Mr.
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