her, what I had learnt from the gardener, and incidentally describing my meeting with the baron ... but for some reason or other, the words died away on my lips. I ventured, however, to observe to my mother, that apparitions do not usually appear in the daytime.... ‘Stop,’ she whispered, ‘please; do not torture me now. You will know some time....’ She was silent again. Her hands were cold and her pulse beat fast and unevenly. I gave her some medicine and moved a little away so as not to disturb her. She did not get up the whole day. She lay perfectly still and quiet, and now and then heaving a deep sigh, and timorously opening her eyes. Every one in the house was at a loss what to think. VIII Towards night my mother became a little feverish, and she sent me away. I did not, however, go to my own room, but lay down in the next room on the sofa. Every quarter of an hour I got up, went on tiptoe to the door, listened.... Everything was still--but my mother hardly slept that night. When I went in to her early in the morning, her face looked hollow, her eyes shone with an unnatural brightness. In the course of the day she got a little better, but towards evening the feverishness increased again. Up till then she had been obstinately silent, but all of a sudden she began talking in a hurried broken voice. She was not wandering, there was a meaning in her words--but no sort of connection. Just upon midnight, she suddenly, with a convulsive movement raised herself in bed--I was sitting beside her--and in the same hurried voice, continually taking sips of water, from a glass beside her, feebly gesticulating with her hands, and never once looking at me, she began to tell her story.... She would stop, make an effort to control herself and go on again.... It was all so strange, just as though she were doing it all in a dream, as though she herself were absent, and some one else were speaking by her lips, or forcing her to speak. IX