And yet it was not quite the last.
I found myself weary and yet wakeful, tossing restlessly from side to side, seeking for the sleep which would not come.
Far away a chiming clock struck out the quarters of the hours, but otherwise a deathly silence lay upon the old house.
And then suddenly, in the very dead of the night, there came a sound to my ears, clear, resonant, and unmistakable.
It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow.
I sat up in bed and listened intently.
The noise could not have been far away and was certainly in the house.
For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy on the wall.
Chapter 7. The Stapletons of Merripit House
The fresh beauty of the following morning did something to efface from our minds the grim and gray impression which had been left upon both of us by our first experience of Baskerville Hall.