flashed over me like the haunting of a heavy dream. I laughed a
little at the dim memory, with the thought, "I must try to recollect all
the details; they will do to tell Tom," and rose stiffly to return to
bed, when--there it was again, and my heart stopped,--the hand on the
door.

I paused and listened. The door opened with a muffled creak, closed
again, and I heard the lock turn rustily. I would have died now before
getting into that bed again; but there was terror equally without; so I
stood trembling and listened,--listened to heavy, stealthy steps
creeping along on the other side of the bed. I clutched the coverlid,
staring across into the dark.

There was a rush in the air by my face, the sound of a blow, and
simultaneously a shriek, so awful, so despairing, so blood-curdling that
I felt my senses leaving me again as I sank crouching on the floor by
the bed.

And then began the awful duel, the duel of invisible, audible shapes;
of things that shrieked and raved, mingling thin, feminine cries with
low, stifled curses and indistinguishable words. Round and round the
room, footsteps chasing footsteps in the ghastly night, now away by
Tom's bed, now rushing swiftly down the great room until I felt the
flash of swirling drapery on my hard lips. Round and round, turning and
twisting till my brain whirled with the mad cries.

They were coming nearer. I felt the jar of their feet on the floor
beside me. Came one long, gurgling moan close over my head, and then,
crushing down upon me, the weight of a collapsing body; there was long
hair over my face, and in my staring eyes; and as awful silence
succeeded the less awful tumult, life went out, and I fell unfathomable
miles into nothingness.

The gray dawn was sifting through the chinks in the shutters when I
opened my eyes again. I lay stunned and faint, staring up at the mouldy
frescoes on the ceiling, struggling to gather together my wandering
senses and knit them into something like consciousness. But now as I
pulled myself little by little together there was no thought of dreams
before me. One after another the awful incidents of that unspeakable
night came back, and I lay incapable of movement, of action, trying to
piece together the whirling fragments of memory that circled dizzily
around me.

Little by little it grew lighter in the room. I could see the pallid
lines struggling through the shutters behind me, grow stronger along the
broken and dusty floor. The