ncerted at this incident. The footstep
had in it a ghost-like solemnity and tardiness. This phantom vanished in
a moment, and yielded place to more humble conjectures. A human being
approached, whose office and commission were inscrutable. That we were
strangers to each other was easily imagined; but how would my
appearance, in this remote chamber, and loaded with another's property,
be interpreted? Did he enter the house after me, or was he the tenant of
some chamber hitherto unvisited; whom my entrance had awakened from his
trance and called from his couch?

In the confusion of my mind, I still held my burden uplifted. To have
placed it on the floor, and encountered this visitant, without this
equivocal token about me, was the obvious proceeding. Indeed, time only
could decide whether these footsteps tended to this, or to some other,
apartment.

My doubts were quickly dispelled. The door opened, and a figure glided
in. The portmanteau dropped from my arms, and my heart's blood was
chilled. If an apparition of the dead were possible, (and that
possibility I could not deny,) this was such an apparition. A hue,
yellowish and livid; bones, uncovered with flesh; eyes, ghastly, hollow,
woe-begone, and fixed in an agony of wonder upon me; and locks, matted
and negligent, constituted the image which I now beheld. My belief of
somewhat preternatural in this appearance was confirmed by recollection
of resemblances between these features and those of one who was dead. In
this shape and visage, shadowy and death-like as they were, the
lineaments of Wallace, of him who had misled my rustic simplicity on my
first visit to this city, and whose death I had conceived to be
incontestably ascertained, were forcibly recognised.

This recognition, which at first alarmed my superstition, speedily led
to more rational inferences. Wallace had been dragged to the hospital.
Nothing was less to be suspected than that he would return alive from
that hideous receptacle, but this was by no means impossible. The figure
that stood before me had just risen from the bed of sickness, and from
the brink of the grave. The crisis of his malady had passed, and he was
once more entitled to be ranked among the living.

This event, and the consequences which my imagination connected with it,
filled me with the liveliest joy. I thought not of his ignorance of the
causes of my satisfaction, of the doubts to which the circumstances of
our interview would giv