Wafted
by the gentle breeze came the dull moaning and whispering of the pine
trees, the humming of the wind through the telephone wires, and the
discordant cawing of the crows. And it seemed to Martha, as she sat
there and peered out into the garden, that over the whole atmosphere
of the place had come a subtle and hostile change--a change in the
noises of the trees, the birds, the wind; a change in the
flower-scented ether; a change, a most marked and emphatic change, in
the shadows. What was it? What was this change? Whence did it
originate? What did it portend? A slight noise, a most trivial noise,
attracted Martha's attention to the room; she looked round and was
quite startled to see how dark it had grown. In the old days, when she
had scoffed at ghosts, she would as soon have been in the dark as in
the light, the night had no terrors for her; but now--now since those
awful occurrences last year, all was different, and as she peered
apprehensively about her, her flesh crawled. What was there in that
corner opposite, that corner hemmed in on the one side by the
cupboard--how she hated cupboards, particularly when they had shiny
surfaces on which were reflected all sorts of curious things--and the
chest of drawers on the other. It was a shadow, only a shadow, but of
what? She searched the room everywhere to find its material
counterpart, and at last discovered it in the nurse's shawl which hung
over the back of a chair. Then she laughed, and would have gone on
laughing, for she tried to persuade herself that laughter banished
ghosts, when suddenly something else caught her eyes.
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