“No man has ever struck me yet,” she said.  “My husband shall have no second opportunity.  Set the door open, and let me go.”

She passed me, and left the room.  I saw her walk away up the street.  Was she gone for good?

All that night I watched and waited.  No footstep came near the house.  The next night, overcome with fatigue, I lay down on the bed in my clothes, with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning.  My slumber was not disturbed.  The third night, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, passed, and nothing happened.  I lay down on the seventh night, still suspicious of something happening; still in my clothes; still with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning.

My rest was disturbed.  I awoke twice, without any sensation of uneasiness.  The third time, that horrid shivering of the night at the lonely inn, that awful sinking pain at the heart, came back again, and roused me in an instant.  My eyes turned to the left-hand side of the bed.  And there stood, looking at me—­

The Dream Woman again?  No!  My wife.  The living woman, with the face of the Dream—­in the attitude of the Dream—­the fair arm up; the knife clasped in the delicate white hand.

I sprang upon her on the instant; but not quickly enough to stop her from hiding the knife.  Without a word from me, without a cry from her, I pinioned her in a chair.  With one hand I felt up her sleeve; and there, where the Dream Woman had hidden the knife, my wife had hidden it—­the knife with the buckhorn handle, that looked like new.

What I felt when I made that discovery I could not realize at the time, and I can’t describe now.  I took one steady look at her with the knife in my hand.  “You meant to kill me?” I said.

“Yes,” she answered; “I meant to kill you.”  She crossed her arms over her bosom, and stared me coolly in the face.  “I shall do it yet,” she said.  “With that knife.”

I don’t know what possessed me—­I swear to you I am no coward; and yet I acted like a coward.  The horrors got hold of me.  I couldn’t look at her—­I couldn’t speak to her.  I left her (with the knife in my hand), and went out into the night.

There was a bleak wind abroad, and the smell of rain was in the air.  The church clocks chimed the quarter as I walked beyond the last house in the town.  I asked the first policeman I met what hour that was, of which the quarter past had just struck.

The man looked at his watch, and answered, “Two o’clock.”  Two in the morning.  What day of the month was this day that had just begun?  I reckoned it up from the date of my mother’s funeral.  The horrid parallel between the dream and the reality was complete—­it was my birthday!

Had I escaped, the mortal peril which the dream foretold? or had I only received a second warning?  As that doubt crossed my mind I stopped on my way out of the town.  The air had revived me—­I felt in some degree like my own self again.  After a little thinking, I began to see plainly the mistake I had made in leaving my wife free to go where she liked and to do as she pleased.