She was now dashed from the heights of hope, and the shock was double.  She realized that her father had not come, would not come that night; that she would probably have no telegram.  She realized that she was all alone in the house.  Now again unreasoning fear as well as the anxiety for her father seized her.  Again the conviction of the awful population of the empty rooms was upon her.  She sat down again by the window, and she tried to make her reasoning powers reassert themselves.

“If anything comes this way, I shall see it in time, and I can run out the back door and across to the neighbors,” she told herself.  “If anything comes in the back way, I shall hear and have time to run out the front door; and I know there is nothing in the house.”  But she could not reassure herself, since what terrified her, and even temporarily unbalanced her, was fear itself.

Fear multiplied, growing upon itself, spreading out new tentacles with every throb of her imagination, filling the whole house.  All her life she had thought what a frightful thing it would be if ever she were left alone by herself in a house, all night; and now worse than that had come to pass, for she was not alone; the house was peopled by fear and the creatures of fear.  She heard noises constantly that she could not account for, and she also saw things which she could not account for.  Again the small and trivial, acutely stinging horror of some ordinary object in a new and awful guise possessed her.  She was almost paralyzed at the sudden glimpse of something on the divan across the room.  It was a long time before she could possibly totter to investigate, and ascertain it was one of her own gloves.  But it did not strike her as at all funny.  There was still something frightful to her about the glove.  She went back to the window, and soon she distinctly heard a noise up-stairs, and then a shadow crossed the ceiling.  A new horror seized her—­a horror of herself.  She felt that in another moment she might herself become a very part and substance of the fear that was oppressing her.  She had an imagination of jumping up, of running about and screaming, of breaking something.  Then with that clutch at life and reason which is life itself, which all dying and despairing things have at the last, she thought again that there must be somebody, somebody in the whole place to whom she could turn, somebody who would help her, who would pity her.  She had heretofore only thought of the possibility of somebody who would come and stay with her; it now occurred to her that she herself might be the one to go, and that she might escape from this house of fear.  It was suddenly to her as to a prisoner who realizes that all the time his prison doors have been unbarred.