I lay quite still, thinking desperate thoughts, and getting nearer and
nearer to the end that I had been dreading for so many days past. Having
been as well educated as most girls, my lessons in history had made me
acquainted with assassination and murder. Horrors which I had recoiled
from reading in past happy days, now returned to my memory; and, this
time, they interested instead of revolting me. I counted the three
first ways of killing as I happened to remember them, in my books of
instruction:--a way by stabbing; a way by poison; a way in a bed, by
suffocation with a pillow. On that dreadful night, I never once called
to mind what I find myself remembering now--the harmless past time,
when our friends used to say: "Eunice is a good girl; we are all fond of
Eunice." Shall I ever be the same lovable creature again?

While I lay thinking, a strange thing happened. Philip, who had haunted
me for days and nights together, vanished out of my thoughts. My memory
of the love which had begun so brightly, and had ended so miserably,
became a blank. Nothing was left but my own horrid visions of vengeance
and death.

For a while, the strokes of the clock still reached my ears. But it was
an effort to count them; I ended in letting them pass unheeded. Soon
afterward, the round of my thoughts began to circle slowly and more
slowly. The strokes of the clock died out. The round of my thoughts
stopped.

All this time, my eyes were still covered by the handkerchief which I
had laid over them.

The darkness began to weigh on my spirits, and to fill me with distrust.
I found myself suspecting that there was some change--perhaps an
unearthly change--passing over the room. To remain blindfolded any
longer was more than I could endure. I lifted my hand--without being
conscious of the heavy sensation which, some time before, had laid my
limbs helpless on the bed--I lifted my hand, and drew the handkerchief
away from my eyes.

The faint glow of the night-light was extinguished.

But the room was not quite dark. There was a ghastly light trembling
over it; like nothing that I have ever seen by day; like nothing that I
have ever seen by night. I dimly discerned Selina's bed, and the frame
of the window, and the curtains on either side of it--but not the
starlight, and not the shadowy tops of the trees in the garden.

The light grew fainter and fainter; the objects in the room faded slowly
away. Darkness came.

It may be a saying