You were dreaming.
If--" "I wasn't asleep," she denied, a trace of color beginning to creep back into her blanched cheeks.

"I had just lain down.
I heard--or thought I heard--a sound on the veranda roof.

I peeped out through the grill of the shutter.

There, on the roof, not ten feet away from me, stood Rodney Hade.

He was dressed in rags.