CHAPTER XVI
Hilma Ring did not obey Ma Agnew's injunction to sleep round the clock. On the contrary, long before the dictated span, she came broad awake with that wrenching jar back to consciousness which leaves one trembling and with a fear shadow inherited from our ancestors, the tree folk,—a vague terror of things unseen in a half-formed world. Suffocating darkness engulfed her. Not a ray of light anywhere. Not a sound. No tangible bound of demarcation between the world of unconsciousness and the domain of sentient life.
The waking terror abided with her as she lay moveless and forced her mind to orientate itself there in the blackness. Bit by bit the pictures of past days' adventures fell into a pattern as bits of glass in the barrel of a kaleidoscope emerge from chaos to geometric exactness. Particularly did the events just preced-
