“Is it possible that it can have been a _dream_?” she says, with a long sigh, for a moment loosing my arm, and covering her face with her hands. “But no--in a dream I should have been somewhere else, but I was here--_here_--on that bed, and he stood _there_,” pointing with her forefinger, “just _there_, between the foot of it and the window!” She stops, panting. “It is all that brute Wiertz,” say I, in a fury. “I wish I had been buried alive myself, before I had been fool enough to take you to see his beastly daubs.” “Light a candle,” she says, in the same breathless way, her teeth chattering with fright. “Let us make sure that he is not hidden somewhere in the room.” “How could he be?” say I, striking a match; “the door is locked.” “He might have got in by the balcony,” she answers, still trembling violently. “He would have had to have cut a very large hole in the _persiennes_,” say I, half-mockingly. “See, they are intact and well fastened on the inside.” She sinks into an arm-chair, and pushes her loose soft hair from her white face. “It _was_ a dream then, I suppose?” She is silent for a moment or two, while I bring her a glass of water, and throw a dressing-gown round her cold and shrinking form. “Now tell me, my little one,” I say, coaxingly, sitting down at her feet, “what it was--what you thought you saw?” “_Thought_ I saw!” echoes she, with indignant emphasis, sitting upright, while her eyes sparkle feverishly. “I am as certain that I saw him standing there as I am that I see that candle burning--that I see this chair--that I see you.” “_Him!_ but who is _him_?” She falls forward on my neck, and buries her face in my shoulder. “That--dreadful--man!” she says, while her whole body is one tremor. “_What_ dreadful man?” cry I, impatiently. She is silent. “Who was he?” “I do not know.” “Did you ever see him before?” “Oh, no--no, never! I hope to God I may never see him again!” “What was he like?” “Come closer to me,” she says, laying hold of my hand with her small and chilly fingers; “stay _quite_ near me, and I will tell you,”--after a pause--“he had a _nose_!” “My dear soul,” cry I, bursting out with a loud laugh in the silence of the night, “do not most people have noses? Would not he have been much more dreadful if he had had _none_?” “But it was _such_ a nose!” she says, with perfect trembling gravity. “A bottle nose?” suggest I, still cackling. “For heaven’s sake, don’t laugh!” she says, nervously; “if you had seen his face, you would have been as little disposed to laugh as I.” “But his nose?” return I, suppressing my merriment; “what kind of nose was it? See, I am as grave as a judge.”