which were all the time fixed on hers, were lurid and menacing,--so
terrible, in fact, that she turned cold with fear, and felt the very
hair on her head beginning to rise on end. She opened her mouth to
shriek, but found she could not ejaculate a syllable; neither could
she, even with the most desperate efforts, tear her feet from the
floor. On came the figure, and, without swerving either to the right
or left, it glided right up to and through her; and, as she
involuntarily turned round, she saw it disappear through a half-open
staircase window, at least twenty feet above the ground outside.
Shaking all over with terror, and not understanding in the slightest
what to make of it, Martha ran to the boudoir, where her heart almost
sprang out of her body at the spectacle of her sister Mary stretched
at full length on the floor, her cheeks ashy pale, her lips blue.
Martha at once made a frantic rush to the bell, and, in a few minutes,
half the establishment, headed by Mr. Whittingen, poured into the
room. With the aid of a little cold water, Mary speedily recovered,
and, in reply to the anxious inquiries of her sympathetic rescuers as
to what had happened, indignantly demanded why such a horrible
looking creature as "that" piper had been allowed not merely to enter
the house but to come up to her room, and half frighten her to death.
"I had just got my album," she added, "when, feeling some one was in
the room, I turned round--and there (she indicated a spot on the
carpet) was the piper, not ten paces away from me, regarding me with
the most awful look imaginable. I was too taken aback with surprise to
say anything, nor--for some unaccountable reason--could I escape,
before he touched me on the shoulder with one of his icy cold hands,
and then commenced playing. Up and down the floor he paced, backwards
and forwards, never taking his hateful glance off my face and ever
piping the same dismal dirge. At last, unable to stand the strain of
it any longer, and convinced he was a madman, bent on murdering
me--for who but a lunatic would behave in such a way?--I gave way to a
violent fit of hysterics, and fainted. Now tell me who he was, and why
he was permitted to frighten me in this manner?" And Mary stamped her
feet and grew vicious, as only her class will when they are at all
vexed. Her speech was followed by a silence that exasperated her. She
repeated her inquiries with crimson cheeks, and then, as again no one
responded, s