Whether it was that hope was dead, and the quiet that crept over me was the quiet of despair, or that really faith and resignation had come at last, I could not tell; but exhausted, benumbed, half dead, I lay motionless upon the ground, while the moments, crept slowly on, and formed themselves into hours; and still, with an ear that never lost a note of all the dirge that sounded through the forest, I lay, face downward, indifferent and apathetic. Consciousness never slept a single moment of the dreadful hours that passed over me, but Fear and Excitement did; and these terrible enemies only woke, when a sound that was not brawl of stream or roar of wind, profaned the ghastly solitude. It was a sound far fainter and less appalling than those I had been listening to, unmoved, so long, but it roused the keenest terror. Far down the road, I first caught it, so low that it might have been the falling of a nut the high wind had shaken from its tree; again, this time nearer, and the leaves rustle, and a chance bough crackles. I do not stir a hair's breadth from where I lie--the step approaches--I do not raise my head nor move a muscle--I do not think, nor wonder what it is, but all faculties absorbed in one, all energies concentrated in that one effort, I listen for the approaching sound. Nearer and nearer; and the quick terror shoots through every chilled vein. In another moment--but with resistless power, horror sweeps over every sense, and in one wild surge, blots out reason, memory, and consciousness. CHAPTER X. "O, I have passed a miserable night, So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights, That as I am a Christian faithful man, I would not spend another such a night, Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days; So full of dismal terror was the time." RICHARD III. A shapeless tissue of dreams follow this dark warp upon the web of memory--how much the flashes of half-received truth, how much the fabric of distorted fancy, I cannot say. Into some such form as this, they have shaped themselves: mixed up in a confused way with the sights and sounds of that wild solitude, comes the recollection of being clasped in arms whose familiar hold inspired no terror; of hurried words of endearment, and a kiss upon my forehead that lulled the returning pulsations of fear into repose again; then a blank; then shouting voices, and the sound of footsteps, many and heavy, rouse me once more into faint and fitful consciousness, and dim and spectral as a graveyard dance of witches, appear strange men with lanterns, who cluster round me; and as I close my eyes in shuddering fear, Michael's face, in distorted ugliness, takes a hundred ghastly shapes, dances before my eyes, and keeps out everything else, for a space of time unspeakably frightful, as it is immeasurably long.