Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
there was a smile at her lips. If one could have seen her through the
darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of a
virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage. There was that in her which
would drag at her footsteps in this new life.
For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the fantasies
of sleep something that did not belong to sleep--again something from the
wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling. At first it was only as though
a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like the sounds that gather
behind the coming rage of a storm, and again it was as though a
night-prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer. Presently, with a
stir of fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a sound which was not of
the supernatural or of the mind's illusions, but no less dreadful to her
because of that.
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