Then reason began to reassume her sway, and the vague mysterious powers, of whom we shall one day perhaps have a more certain knowledge, withdrew reluctant from their usurped dominion over me. I remembered, however, most distinctly every incident that they had brought about, and I placed my hand mechanically upon my left cheek--I had been lying upon my right--upon which the tear had seemed to fall. Great Heaven, <i>it was still wet</i>! I was really startled. The cloudless sky forbade the idea of a drop of rain having fallen; I had shed no tear myself while dreaming, for my eyes were dry, and even if I had, it could scarcely have dropped as it did, making a cool round spot in the centre of the cheek--it would have slid down and left a little frigid line: there were no stones for the stream to splash against and thus besprinkle me. It was very odd. Still, I did not imagine for a moment that my poor black nurse had really come across the seas to drop the tributary tear upon her sleeping boy; moreover, she could scarcely have got away so suddenly without leaving some trace of her departure, some...--My heart all of a sudden ceased to beat; a shiver ran through me, as runs from stem to stern through a doomed ship that comes end on at speed upon a sunken rock; my eyes had fallen--while I thus reasoned with myself--upon a sight to terrify an older man than I, after such a dream; <i>the print of a woman's bare feet in the sand</i>. Had there been any footprints--those of a keeper or watcher, for instance--I should have been startled to know that some one had passed by while I slumbered, for most certainly the sand had been untrodden up to the moment I had lost consciousness; but that a woman with naked feet had been really present while I dreamed that horrible dream, was something more than startling. In Scotland such a circumstance would have been less remarkable, but in Fairburn I had not yet seen any person without shoes. There were a considerable number of footprints, but only of one individual: she had stood beside me for some time, for they were deeper close to the place where I had lain, and there was also one impression there which looked as though the mysterious visitor had knelt. They had come and returned the same way, which was not the one that I had come myself, and they began and ended at the stream-side a few yards beyond, and out of sight of the bend which was my favourite haunt. The woman had doubtless crossed and recrossed by means of some natural stepping-stones that showed their heads above water; there was no path on the other side, but only a tangled thicket, through which it would have been impossible to track her, even had I been so disposed, which I was not. To say truth, I was terribly discomposed. For a minute or two I clung to the notion that the footprints were my own, made, perhaps, under the influence of somnambulism. I took off my shoes, and measured the tracks with my own