ernatural beings,
one of whom she believed had visited her.

That consideration was this. The two hours of absence from the hall of
its male inhabitants, would be from nine o'clock until eleven, and those
were not the two hours during which she felt that she would be most
timid on account of the vampyre.

"It was after midnight before," she thought, "when it came, and perhaps
it may not be able to come earlier. It may not have the power, until
that time, to make its hideous visits, and, therefore, I will believe
myself safe."

She had made up her mind not to go to bed until the return of her
brothers, and she and her mother sat in a small room that was used as a
breakfast-room, and which had a latticed window that opened on to the
lawn.

This window had in the inside strong oaken shutters, which had been
fastened as securely as their construction would admit of some time
before the departure of the brothers and Mr. Marchdale on that
melancholy expedition, the object of which, if it had been known to her,
would have added so much to the terrors of poor Flora.

It was not even guessed at, however remotely, so that she had not the
additional affliction of thinking, that while she was sitting there, a
prey to all sorts of imaginative terrors, they were perhaps gathering
fresh evidence, as, indeed, they were, of the dreadful reality of the
appearance which, but for the collateral circumstances attendant upon
its coming and its going, she would fain have persuaded herself was but
the vision of a dream.

It was before nine that the brothers started, but in her own mind Flora
gave them to eleven, and when she heard ten o'clock sound from a clock
which stood in the hall, she felt pleased to think that in another hour
they would surely be at home.

"My dear," said her mother, "you look more like yourself, now."

"Do, I, mother?"

"Yes, you are well again."

"Ah, if I could forget--"

"Time, my dear Flora, will enable you to do so, and all the fear of what
made you so unwell will pass away. You will soon forget it all."

"I will hope to do so."

"Be assured that, some day or another, something will occur, as Henry
says, to explain all that has happened, in some way consistent with
reason and the ordinary nature of things, my dear Flora."

"Oh, I will cling to such a belief; I will get Henry, upon whose
judgment I know I can rely, to tell me so, and each time that I hear
such words from his lips, I will contrive