’Don’t leave me, Frank; at least not yet, till I am more composed.  My nerves are dreadfully shaken to-night, and I feel afraid of something, I don’t know what.  How the wind howls and moans!  I never heard it like that but once before, and that was years ago, among the Alps in Switzerland.  Then it blew off the roof of the chalet where I was staying, and I heard afterward that Amy died that night.  You remember Amy, the girl I loved so well, though not as I love Gretchen.  If she had come, I should have told you all about her, but now it does not matter who she is, or where I saw her first, knitting in the sunshine, with the halo on her hair and the blue of the summer skies reflected in her eyes.  Oh, Gretchen, my love, my love!’

He was talking more to himself than to Frank, who sat beside him until far into the night, while the wild storm raged on and shook the solid house to its very foundations.  A tall tree in the yard was uprooted, and a chimney-top came crushing down with a force which threatened to break through the roof.  For a moment there was a lull in the tempest, and, raising himself upon his elbow, Arthur listened intently, while he said, in a whisper which made Frank’s blood curdle in his veins: 

’Hark! there’s more abroad to-night than the storm!  Something is happening or has happened which affects me.  I have heard voices in the wind—­Gretchen calling me from far away.  Frank, Frank, did you hear that?  It was a woman’s cry; her voice—­Gretchen’s.  Yes, Gretchen, I am coming!’

And with a bound he was at the window, which he opened wide, and leaning far out of it, listened to hear repeated a sound which Frank, too, had heard—­a cry like the voice of one in mortal peril calling for help.

It might have been the wind, which on the instant swept round the corner in a great gust, driving the snow and sleet into Arthur’s face, and making him draw in his body, nearly half of which was leaning from the window as he waited for the strange cry to be repeated.  But it did not come again, though Frank, whose nerves were strung to almost as high a tension as his brother’s, thought he heard it once above the roar of the tempest, and a vague feeling of disquiet took possession of him as he sat for an hour longer watching his brother and listening to the noise without.

Gradually the storm subsided, and when the clock struck one the wind had gone down, the snow had ceased to fall, and the moon was struggling feebly through a rift of dark clouds in the west.  After persuading his brother to go to bed, Frank retired to his own room and was soon asleep, unmindful of the tragedy which was being enacted not very far away, where a little child was smiling in its dreams, while the woman beside it was praying for life until her mission should be accomplished.

CHAPTER XII.

THE TRAMP HOUSE.