If he should
return--there was no lock or bolt upon the door, and if,
distrustful of having left some money yet behind, he should come
back to seek for more--a vague awe and horror surrounded the idea
of his slinking in again with stealthy tread, and turning his face
toward the empty bed, while she shrank down close at his feet to
avoid his touch, which was almost insupportable. She sat and
listened. Hark! A footstep on the stairs, and now the door was
slowly opening. It was but imagination, yet imagination had all
the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would
have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it was
always coming, and never went away.
The feeling which beset the child was one of dim uncertain horror.
She had no fear of the dear old grandfather, in whose
love for her this disease of the brain had been engendered; but the
man she had seen that night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking
in her room, and counting the money by the glimmering light, seemed
like another creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his
image, a something to recoil from, and be the more afraid of,
because it bore a likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he
did.
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