nerved herself for an
effort. "That was not it. I have often wanted to tell you, but I
cannot bear to speak of it. The old horror always comes back when
I think of it. But I feel that I ought to tell you before we are
married, and I will do so now since we are speaking of it. I did not
have brain fever, but when I was nine years old--I died."

"You what?"

"Yes, it is true. They called it catalepsy, a trance; but it was not;
I was really dead. I was thrown from a horse a few months after my
mother's death, and killed instantly. They laid me in the family
vault, but my father had ice put about me and would not have me
covered, and went every hour to see me, as he told me afterward. I
remember nothing; and they say that when people are in a trance they
are conscious of everything that passes around them. I knew nothing
until one night I suddenly opened my eyes and looked about me. It was
just such a night as this, only in mid-winter; the wind was howling
and shrieking, and the terrible gusts shook the vault in which I lay.
The ocean roared like thunder, and I could hear it hurl itself in its
fury against the rocks at the foot of the castle. A lamp was burning
at my feet, and by its flickering light I could see in their niches
on every side of me the long lines of dead who had lain there for
centuries. And I was alone with them, locked in with them; no living
creature within call! And I was so deathly cold. There was a great
block of ice on my chest, and slabs of it were packed about my limbs
so tightly that I could not move. I could only feel that horrible,
glassy cold which I knew had frozen the marrow in my bones and turned
my blood to jelly; and the pain of it was something which I have no
words to describe. I tried to call out, but the ice was on my chest,
and I could hardly breathe. Then for a moment I lay trying to collect
my thoughts. I did not know where I was. I did not know that I was in
the vault of my ancestors. I only felt that I had been wandering and
wandering in some dim, far-off land looking for someone I could never
find, and that suddenly I had come into another world and found rest.
But although I did not know that I was in the vault at Rhyd-Alwyn, and
that my name was Weir Penrhyn, I knew that I was laid out as a corpse,
and that the dead were about me. Child as I was, it seemed to me that
I must go frantic with the horror of the thing, stretched out in that
ghastly place, a storm roaring about me,