some sight unspeakable seemed to linger in the awful lines about the staring eyes, and in the wild hollows of the marble cheeks--marble white, and with the rigidity of marble too. A murmur of horror came from the women, cowed at the sight, except Mrs. Mills, who held up her candle, throwing a strange light upon the paralysed face. The candle trembled in her hand, but she uttered no word. It was thought afterwards that this was what she had expected to see. And presently, running in hot haste, with every mark of agitation, pale, with the perspiration pouring down his face, as if he had been engaged in some mortal struggle, the young doctor in his ordinary dress came down the corridor and entered Hetty’s room. He had the tail of his coat half torn off at one side, the governess remarked, as, remembering her own undressed condition, she took refuge behind the curtain. The young man flung himself down on his knees by the bedside, calling out to the housekeeper to hold her candle low, and loosening or trying to loosen the rigid hands. “Is she dead, Doctor? Is she dead?” Mrs. Mills said in a low voice of horror. She trembled in every limb, but she was not surprised. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XX. A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. This was what had happened to Hetty. In the middle of the night she had woke up suddenly as on that occasion when she had come to life out of her dreams, and felt the intolerable darkness go chill to her very soul. What it was that awakened her, whether sound or sensation, the rush of the cold night air, or only some consciousness of trouble and horror, she never could tell. She woke, but not to darkness this time. Her eyes went to the light instinctively--to the faint long opening of the window, which though all moonlight was gone still marked itself upon the darkness around. She woke with a gasp and suppressed cry. Her first sensation was the freshness of the air, which showed that her window was open, and then that something moved in that lighter space through which the wind blew. A terror, to which all her previous fright seemed only preliminary, a horror of anticipation and certainty, froze her very soul. Whatever it was, it had come, it had her at last. She lay paralyzed, not able to move; her eyes, the only capable things in her, straining into that dimness, a little lighter than the darkness, where something unformed and horrible moved: moved! that could be no delusion. She saw it with all the clearness of her young, keen faculties, strung into the most dreadful acuteness of perception--not what it was, but that it moved, now blocking the faint grey, wavering in it, moving out of it, in, into the darkness of her room, near her, close to her. Hetty lay motionless, in a trance of unspeakable terror. What it was she could not say. It would have been less horrible had she been able to see it. It was something that moved, that was all. And then there followed faint, stealthy sounds as if of