I counted the days with eager impatience,
and already five of the seven had departed. At
night I had gone to bed, and fallen asleep with
a pleasant dreamy sense of approaching escape,
and had slept, I suppose, several hours, when I
suddenly awakened by the sound of the splashing
of water in my room. Looking towards
the washing-stand (a night-light, without which
my terrors would not allow me to sleep, faintly
lighted the chamber), I descried the figure of a
woman, whose back was towards me, washing
her hands.

I had never seen her before, of that I was
quite certain, nor anything the least like her.

She was tall and thin, dressed in a loose,
shapeless garment, and her hair, which was dark,
was cropped close to her head.

Apparently unconscious of my presence, there
she stood, washing her hands, but with an
energy and intensity of purpose, curious in so
ordinary an occupation; rubbing and wringing
them, as if she would take the skin off, pausing
to examine them, then with an exclamation of
impatient disappointment—sometimes a sort of
shudder—plunging them back into the water,
splashing, rubbing, and wringing them again and
again.

So extreme were my amazement and terror at
this extraordinary apparition, that for some
minutes I could neither speak nor move. As I lay,
I heard the clock strike three, and as it was
summer, I knew daylight was near: this was
some slight relief. If I could only lie still
till sunrise, I thought I might summon courage
to address my wondrous visitor, or perhaps she
might then retire. So I tried to regulate even
my breathing so as not to attract her attention,
and lay still, my eyes riveted on her with a
fearful fascination, waiting for what might
come.

For what did come I was little prepared.
After long scouring and rubbing her hands, but
apparently with no satisfactory result, she turned,
aud I saw her face.

Child as I was, I felt that it had in it a
something that placed it out of the nature or
order of all other faces. Not without traces
of beauty, even in its haggard pallor and sunken
eyes, it yet wore the stamp of something that
seemed to me not to belong to humanity. There
was a sort of mingled wildness and vacancy in
the expression of the pale lips, of the troubled
eyes, unnaturally yet gloomily bright in their
dark and hollow orbits, like sullen fires in
airless caves; and the thick, cropped, dark hair,
coming in a ridge straight across the forehead,
added not a little to the singular effect of the
countenance.

At first her eye seemed to wander vacantly
about the room, as it with a half-consciousness
that it was unfamiliar to her. Then, after a
while, it lighted on me.

She came quickly up to the bed, gazed at me
with eager, startled scrutiny, then with hasty
hand drawing down the bed-clothes a little way,
she began feeling my throat.

Feeling it, not graspingly or clutchingty, or
as though intending it any harm, but as if to
satisfy some intense anxiety—to assure herself
of some peculiarity respecting it.

What followed I cannot tell; for with her
hand, deadly cold and wet on my throat, I
became insensible.

A brain fever was the result of this night's
adventure. And then came a dark period—I
have never dared to inquire into the particulars
of it, or even how long it lasted—of overshadowed
consciousness, from which I awoke but
gradually, and with occasional relapses.

That the period must have been considerable
I know; for when I recovered I had arrived at
another stage of growth, being no longer a child
but a youth; and my father's hair was sprinkled
with grey, and his face marked with lines I did
not remember.

We were in France when I awoke from that
long mental slumber, of whose very dreams I
had no recollection; living in Brittany, in as
retired a manner as we had lived at the old
house in Cornwall.

Then we travelled for some years, and so I
grew to manhood. Quite sane, and in full
possession of my mental faculties, but always with
a lingering sense of instability in their tenure,
a dread of aught that might tend to shock or
shake them, and a shy unwillingness to join in
the society of those of my own age, or indeed
to go forth at all into a world which had
never been other than alien and unknown to
me.

So I continued to the age of three-and-twenty,
when my father died; died, taking with him the
secret that had so terribly influenced my life.
But years afterwards, when time and the necessity
of action had brought with them their
salutary results, and that living like other
men, I had become as other men, my uncle,
my father's only brother, revealed to me the
mystery.

My father, at eight-and-twenty, had married
my mother, then barely seventeen.

She was very pretty, very childish, fond of
pleasure and the amusements of her age, and
having been one of a large and happy, and
well-united family, the change from her own
gay home and circle to the lonely old house in
Cornwall, and my father's grave, studious habits,
fell heavily on her, and soon she pined in secret
for what she had lost. My father saw it, and
though deeply pained and disappointed, he was
the first to propose what she was longing for, a
visit to her family.

This was some three months before the
expected period of my birth; he took her to her
home, and it was settled that there he should
leave her till her confinement should take place,
at which period he was to rejoin her, and, in
due time, to conduct her back to Cornwall.

But ere she had been more than a month
away, news came to her that my father had been
attacked with a pleurisy of the most dangerous
kind, and she, smitten with grief and something
like self-reproach, would listen to no persuasions
that could keep her from him, and the next day,