nd her teeth savagely. Beads of perspiration stood thickly on her
forehead. Her clenched hands rose and fell slowly from time to time on
her lap. Was she in the agony of a dream? or was she spiritually
conscious of something hidden in the room?

The doubt involved in that last question was unendurable. Agnes
determined to rouse the servants who kept watch in the hotel at night.

The bell-handle was fixed to the wall, on the side of the bed by which
the table stood.

She raised herself from the crouching position which she had assumed in
looking close at the Countess; and, turning towards the other side of
the bed, stretched out her hand to the bell. At the same instant, she
stopped and looked upward. Her hand fell helplessly at her side. She
shuddered, and sank back on the pillow.

What had she seen?

She had seen another intruder in her room.

Midway between her face and the ceiling, there hovered a human
head--severed at the neck, like a head struck from the body by the
guillotine.

Nothing visible, nothing audible, had given her any intelligible
warning of its appearance. Silently and suddenly, the head had taken
its place above her. No supernatural change had passed over the room,
or was perceptible in it now. The dumbly-tortured figure in the chair;
the broad window opposite the foot of the bed, with the black night
beyond it; the candle burning on the table--these, and all other
objects in the room, remained unaltered. One object more, unutterably
horrid, had been added to the rest. That was the only change--no more,
no less.

By the yellow candlelight she saw the head distinctly, hovering in
mid-air above her. She looked at it steadfastly, spell-bound by the
terror that held her.

The flesh of the face was gone. The shrivelled skin was darkened in
hue, like the skin of an Egyptian mummy--except at the neck. There it
was of a lighter colour; there it showed spots and splashes of the hue
of that brown spot on the ceiling, which the child's fanciful terror
had distorted into the likeness of a spot of blood. Thin remains of a
discoloured moustache and whiskers, hanging over the upper lip, and
over the hollows where the cheeks had once been, made the head just
recognisable as the head of a man. Over all the features death and
time had done their obliterating work. The eyelids were closed. The
hair on the skull, discoloured like the hair on the face, had been
burnt away in places. The bluish lips, parted in