She 173 looked under the chair over which hung her clothes, even behind the dresses and the Indian deerskin cape hanging on the door.
There was no life of any kind save her own in the room, so far as she could see.

She laughed nervously, though her heart was still beating hard.

That it should beat hard was absurd, for what had she to fear--she who had lived the wild open-air life of many lands, had slept among hills infested by animals the enemy of man, and who when a little girl had faced beasts of prey alone.

Yet here in her own safe room on the Sagalac, with its four walls, but its unlocked doors--for Gabriel Druse said that he could not bear that last sign of his exile--here in the fortress of the town-dweller there was a strange trembling of her pulses in the presence of a mere hallucination or nightmare--the first she had had ever.

Her dreams in the past had always been happy and without the black fancies of nightmare.