! They
love!"

The second time, as he stared, suddenly he saw them! They stood just
beyond the foot of his couch, wrapped in each other's arms. Choking with
wrath, freezing with horror, he slid to the floor; but at his first step
they floated apart. Isabel glided toward her own door, fading as she
went, and dissolved in a broad moonbeam. Leonard, as he receded, grew
every instant more real, until, at his pursuer's second step, he melted
through a window and was gone. Arthur sprang to the spot and stared out
and down; but all he saw was the moon, the frosty night, and the silent,
motionless garden.

With a whisper of fierce purpose he turned and noiselessly threw on his
clothes, then clutched his head in his hands in a wild effort to recall
what the purpose was, and by and by lay quietly down again on his bed.
He could not recollect; but the inner tumult quieted more and more, and
after a time, without putting off any part of his dress, he drew the
bedcovers over himself, and in a few moments was partially asleep. So
for an hour or more he lay in half-waking dreams, ghastly with phantoms
and breathless with dismay of his own ferocious strivings. Then he rose
once more, and, with the noiselessness which habit had perfected, left
his room, moved down the upper hall and the stair, and let himself out
into the garden. Wadded in his arms he bore one or two of the coverings
from his bed. He took his way to the pond.

He was walking in his sleep.

At an earlier day Isabel would have been awakened by her husband's
softest movement; but now, used to his stirrings, weary in body and
mind, and in some degree reassured, she slept on unstartled until
Arthur's return.

He came as silently as he had gone, and was empty-handed. He had tied a
great stone in the two bed-coverings, and through the thin new ice of
the hole where Minnie had broken in had sunk them in the black depth
under the shelving rock. He was still asleep.

The door between the two chambers gave a faint sound as he opened it,
yet neither mother nor child moved. A moment passed, and he had reached
the bed. Another went by, and Isabel was awake, wildly but vainly trying
to scream, to rise. A knee was on her bosom, two hands grappled her
throat, and two out-starting eyes were close to hers. Her husband was
strangling her.

Then he too awoke. With a horrified cry he recoiled, and she, for the
first time in her life in a transport of terror, hurled him, in the
stre