It was there,"--she
looked again at the place where the Thing had been--"and your curse drove
it away."
With confidence she went to the door and unlocked it. Going to the window
she opened it also, but she compromised sufficiently to open it at the
top instead of at the bottom. Presently she laid her head on her pillow
with a sigh of content.
Once again she composed herself to sleep in the darkness. But now there
came other invasions, other disturbers of the night. In her imagination a
man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River, who
had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness. As
she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions of
things which her childhood had known--moonlit passes in the Bosnian,
Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant
voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun
deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted with
flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels
thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert,
while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a
tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the
western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate
green and purple.
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