Hark! A footstep on the stairs, and now the door was slowly opening.

It was but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it was always coming, and never went away.
The feeling which beset the child was one of dim uncertain horror.

She had no fear of the dear old grandfather, in whose love for her this disease of the brain had been engendered; but the man she had seen that night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking in her room, and counting the money by the glimmering light, seemed like another creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his image, a something to recoil from, and be the more afraid of, because it bore a likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he did.

She could scarcely connect her own affectionate companion, save by his loss, with this old man, so like yet so unlike him.

She had wept to see him dull and quiet.