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shutters trembled, the panes rattled, and there were scratchings as if an army of rats had invaded the attic.
    â€œOh, Charlie!”
    He took his wife in his arms, held her tightly, whispering. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Biddy. You’ve got me here, my sweetheart, my wife, my little love, you’re not alone now. I’m here, nothing can hurt you.”
    Her tears wet his cheek.
    â€œJust what is it you’re afraid of?”
    â€œI don’t know,” she wailed.
    They clung together. Bedelia made herself small against him so that he should feel larger and more necessary to the frail woman. Since their wedding night he had been trying to helpher overcome her fear of the dark. Her efforts had been so sincere that Charlie had never scolded nor laughed at her for the childishness of her terror.
    Gradually her fears had infected him. In the daytime he resolved to harden himself against contagion, but when she clung to him in the dark, weeping, his mind filled with strange fancies and his flesh, under the blankets, chilled. By day his wife was earthy, a woman who loved her home and had a genuine talent for housekeeping. In the dark she seemed entirely another sort of creature, female but sinister, a woman whose face Charlie had never seen. It was absurd for a man of his intelligence to let himself be affected by these vague and formless fantasies, and he tried to account for his wife’s fear of the dark by remembering that she had lived a hard life. Her girlhood, according to stories she had told them in bits and pieces, a stray anecdote here, a fragment there, had been shadowed by so much misfortune and disillusionment that it would have been abnormal for her to not have been affected.
    None of this reasoning did Charlie the slightest bit of good. The phantoms dwelt there as if they had taken a lease on the bedroom. On every other night he had weakened and relit the lamp. Tonight he was determined to prove by disapproval that the darkness was uninhabited and that he had no sympathy for her irrational, childish terror.
    A quivering scream rent the blackness. Cold winds swept through the room. Under the blankets Charlie shivered.
    â€œWhat is it, my dear?”
    Bedelia did not scream again. After a silence so deep that she seemed to have stopped breathing, she whispered faintly, “Did you see it, too?”
    â€œSee what?” His voice was crisp with disapproval.
    â€œIt moved.”
    â€œNow, Biddy,” he began firmly and coolly.
    â€œI saw it.”
    â€œThere’s nothing in the room, nothing. It’s absurd for you . . .”
    She pulled away from him and moved to the edge of the bed.The pillow did not muffle her sobs nor the mattress conceal her tremors. The house was filled, quite suddenly, with small terrible sounds that were closer and more distinct than the rushing fury of the river.
    In the ten seconds that passed while he stretched his hand toward the lamp, Charlie recognized the weakness that had taken possession of his spirit. It was a newly acquired quality. Charlie Philbrick Horst had been trained in the school that rejects idle whims and scorns self-indulgence. Morally slothful, his mother would have called his present state of mind.
    â€œOh, Charlie-Horse, darling, how good and sweet you are,” his wife murmured. Her tremors ceased. She relaxed, wiped away tears with the back of her hand, offered a dimpled smile.
    A small, rose-shaded lamp shed light in a cone on the carpet. The furniture of the bedroom was real and assuring. Above the mantel hung a portrait of Charlie’s mother at seventeen, a righteous girl, her lips tight with disapproval. And Charlie would assure himself that it was for his wife’s sake that he had turned on the light. In this way he was arming himself against the scorn of weakness which had been planted in him by his mother.
    â€œYou’re so good, so thoughtful, such an unusual man,” Bedelia whispered.