The blow overcame me. It will be best to pass over that time. I shut myself into my room and bore my agony alone. I went once into the room where Helen lay and looked at her face. It was the face of one in peaceful rest, but it had aged twenty years in twelve hours. Her maids, directed by Mrs. Grayson, an old friend of the family, were ready to prepare her for the grave. “They think,” whispered Mrs. Grayson, “that she had walked in her sleep. Her feet are scratched and torn, as if she had been among briars barefoot, and the doctors say that her convulsions probably came on from the shock of awakening. She was found at daybreak, unconscious, in the hall, and the outer door was wide open.” I left the plantation a few days after the funeral, and for years neither saw nor heard directly from Robert Glen. I never could forgive his indifference to Helen’s peace of mind while she lived, nor get over a certain disgust with which his lack of self-control at the time of her death inspired me. I never liked him, and, after that sad time, I had less regard for him than ever. I never told him the story I have written. He would only have pronounced me mad, and I did not wish to obtain that reputation for the mere sake of warning him. Besides, I tried with all my mind to believe the experience of that night a dream, but I found that impossible and was always looking for a sequel to it. The sequel came in its appointed time. Years passed away. At the outbreak of the war, the Graysons came North. From them, I learned that Asenath had disappeared from the plantation long before, and was supposed to have drowned herself in the black creek and to haunt the plantation in the form of a black-and-white snake. Dr. Grayson blamed himself for her death.