Till then she would try hard not to go to sleep. But she was tired to
death from her long run through the forest and was obliged at last to
throw herself on the bear skin coverlet to rest; and gradually sleep
overcame all her anguish, all her terror.
She might have slept for about a half an hour, a restless,
phantom-haunted sleep at best, when she suddenly awoke.
It seemed to her as if she had heard a distant cry. Perhaps she had only
imagined she had heard it in her slumbers, and perhaps what she had
dreamt was so awful and what she fancied she had heard was so terrible,
that it had awakened her.
She began to listen attentively. After midnight every light sound seems
so loud.
She fancied in the great stillness that she could hear rapidly
approaching footsteps.
Again a cry! like the cry of a hunted beast, like the cry of a wounded
wolf!
She was not dreaming now, she could hear it plainly. She saw where she
was. The moonlight was streaming through the window, she could see to
the end of all three rooms.
Suddenly at the window overlooking the garden whence the moonbeams
streamed in, a black shape appeared which obscured the moonlight for an
instant.
This shape leaped through the window and, panting hard, rushed through
the two rooms into the third where the arms stood.
Henrietta saw it fly past her bed, she heard its panting sobs
and--recognized it.
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