Explore "The Mill of Silence" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was not immediate death that had alighted, but death's forerunner, paralysis. I realized this in a moment. The mute and stricken figure; the closed eyes; the darkly flushed face wrenched to the right and the flapping breath issuing one-sided from the lips -- I needed no experience to read the meaning of these.
I ran to the head of the stairs and shrieked to old Peggy to come up. Then I hurried to the dressing-table and lighted a candle that stood thereon. As I took it in my hand to approach the bed, a pane in the lattice behind me went with a splintering noise, and something whizzed past my head like a hornet, and a fragment of plaster spun from the wall near. At the same instant a little muffled sound, no louder in the tumult of hail than the smack of an elastic band on paper, came from the street outside.