It was actually to the child as if she were passing through a thick group of mysterious, inimical things concealed by the darkness.  It was as if she heard whispers of conspiracy; it was even as if she smelled odors of strange garments and bodies.  Every sense in her was on the alert.  She even tasted something bitter in her mouth.  It was all absurd.  She reiterated in her ears that it was all absurd, but she had now passed the point wherein reason can support.  She had come through an unusually active imagination into the unknown quantities and sequences of life.  She put out her hands and groped her way through the darkness of the hall, and the fear lest she should touch some one, some terrible thing, was as bad as the reality could have been.  She knew best where to find matches in the dining-room, so she went through the hall, with a sort of mad rush in spite of her blindness, and she gained the dining-room and felt along the shelf for a little hammered-brass bowl where matches were usually kept.  In it she felt only two.  The mantel-shelf was the old-fashioned marble monstrosity, the perpetuation of a false taste in domestic architecture, but it was excellent as to its facilities for scratching matches.  She rubbed one of the two matches under the shelf on the rough surface, but it did not ignite.  It evidently was a half-burned match.  She took the other.  It seemed to her that if that failed her, if she had to grope about the kitchen for more in this thick blackness—­for even the street-light did not reach this room—­she should die.  She rubbed the last match against the marble, and it blazed directly.  She shielded it carefully with her hand from the door draught, and succeeded in lighting a candle in one of a pair of brass candlesticks which stood on the shelf.  She then held the flaring light aloft and looked fearfully around the room.  Everything was as usual, but, strangely enough, it did not reassure her.  The solitariness continued to hold terrible possibilities for her as well as the darkness, and with the light also returned what had been for a few minutes in abeyance before her purely selfish fear, the anxiety over her father.  She moved about the house with the candle, going from room to room.  It seemed to her that she could not remain one minute if she did not do so.  Every time before entering a room she felt sure that it was occupied.  Every time after leaving it she felt sure that something unknown was left there.  She went into the kitchen, and saw her miserable little dinner drying up in the shelf of the range, and then for the first time self-pity asserted itself.  She sat down and sobbed and sobbed.

“There, I got that nice dinner, that beautiful dinner,” she said to herself, quite aloud in a pitiful wail like a baby’s, “and perhaps poor papa will never even taste it.  Oh dear!  Oh dear!”