Miss Silver Deals with Death

Meade Underwood woke with a start. Something had waked her—some sound—but she did not know what it was. It had startled her back from a dream in which she walked with Giles Armitage—Giles who was dead. But in her dream he wasn’t dead, but warm and alive, and they walked together and were glad.She listened for the sound that had waked her with bitter resentment in her heart. Only once before had he been so near to her in a dream. Sometimes he called her in a voice which wrung her heart, sometimes he whispered and she could not catch the words, but in this one dream there had been no words at all, only a deep and satisfied content.And she had waked. They had found each other, and she had waked and lost him all over again. She sat up and listened. It was the third time she had waked like this in the night with that sense of a sound heard in sleep. There was no sound now. Her waking memory had no knowledge of what the sound had been. Wind? The night was still. A passing car—the hoot of an owl—a bat brushing against the window—someone moving here, or in the flat overhead.... She rejected these things one by one. A car would not have startled her. It wasn’t an owl—not that sort of sound, not a cry at all—somehow she did know that. And not a bat. Who had ever heard of a bat blundering up against a window? The floors in this old house were much too solid and thick to let any sound come through from above, and in the flat around her no one stirred.