A little twilight wind came creeping over the grey grass, it covered her feet like water, it rose higher and higher above the sword points of the aloes, and she sank in it and floated, floated and sank.  And now it tossed and rolled and shook the palm-trees till all their blades rattled like steel; and beyond the wind she heard the calling of the thing she feared, the thing that had hunted her from dream to dream.  She feared it no longer; she too was looking and crying; all her desire was to find what she had feared; to answer it, to see it face to face.  Her body was clasped tight by the arms of the wind; yet her yearning was so strong that she struggled with them and flung them from her, breaking through the bonds and barriers of sleep.

Lucia was awake and accounting for her dream.  The weather had changed in the night, and a cold wind was rushing through the open window on to her bed.  She had been lying with her feet uncovered, and the bed-clothes heaped on to her chest.  She had been waked by the rattling of a loosened lattice in the room below.  She got out of bed and looked out of the window.  There was a vast movement in the sky, as if the darkness were being visibly upheaved and rolled away westwards by the wind.  Over the garden was the dense grey blackness of an obliterated dawn.  The trees, not yet detached from the ground of night, showed like monstrous skeletons of the whole immense body of gloom, while the violent rocking of their branches made them one with that dark and wandering tumult of cloud and wind.

The shaft of light no longer lay upon the lawn; Mr. Rickman’s lamp was out; therefore, she argued, Mr. Rickman had gone; having, in the recklessness of his genius, forgotten to close the library windows.

One of the west windows creaked and crashed by turns as it swung heavily in its leaded frame.  Lucia put on her dressing gown and slippers, threw a light shawl about her shoulders, and went down to fasten the lattice.  A small swinging lamp gave light to the hall and staircase.  A gleam followed her into the library; it lay in a pool behind her, its thin stream lost in the blackness of the floor.  She could distinguish nothing in the room but the three dim white busts on their dusky pedestals.  Behind the latticework the window panes were like chequered sheets of liquid twilight let down over the face of the night.

The wind held the open lattice backwards, and she had some difficulty in reaching the hasp.  A shallow gust ran over the floor, chilling her half-naked feet.  As she leaned out on the sill a great fear came over her, the fear that had always possessed her in childhood at the coming and passing of the night.  As she struggled with the lattice, she had a sense of pulling it against some detaining hand.  It swung slowly round and the figure of a man slid with it side-long, and stood behind it looking in.  The figure seemed to lean forward out of the darkness; its face, pressed close against the panes, was vivid, as if seen in a strong daylight.  She saw the flame of its red moustache and hair, the flicker of its faun-like tilted smile.  Its eyes were fixed piercingly on hers.