distemper. Perhaps either she or her old man have been taken with some trifling temporary sickness. Perhaps the noise of crying out that I certainly heard was one of them fighting with a nightmare.’ Trying, by such like suggestions, to hearten myself up, I stole across the passage and peeped in----” I pause in my narrative. “Well?” says Jane, a little impatiently. She has dropped her flowers. They lie in odorous dewy confusion in her lap. She is listening rather eagerly. I cover my face with my hands. “Oh! my dear,” I cry, “I do not think I can go on. It was _too_ dreadful! Now that I am telling it I seem to be doing and hearing it over again----” “I do not call it very kind to keep me on the rack,” she says, with a rather forced laugh. “Probably I am imagining something much worse than the reality. For heaven’s sake speak up! What _did_ you see?” I take hold of her hand and continue. “You know that in your room the bed exactly faces the door. Well, when I looked in, looked in with eyes blinking at first, and dazzled by the long darkness they had been in, it seemed to me as if that bed were only one horrible sheet of crimson; but as my sight grew clearer I saw what it was that caused that frightful impression of universal red----” Again I pause with a gasp and feeling of oppressed breathing. “Go on! go on!” cries my companion, leaning forward, and speaking with some petulance. “Are you never going to get to the point?” “Jane,” say I solemnly, “do not laugh at me, nor pooh pooh me, for it is God’s truth--as clearly and vividly as I see you now, strong, flourishing, and alive, so clearly, so vividly, with no more of dream haziness nor of contradiction in details than there is in the view I now have of this room and of you--I saw you _both_--you and your husband, lying _dead_--_murdered_--drowned in your own blood!” “What, both of us?” she says, trying to laugh, but her healthy cheek has rather paled. “Both of you,” I answer, with growing excitement. “You, Jane, had evidently been the one first attacked--taken off in your sleep--for you were lying just as you would have lain in slumber, only that across your throat from there to there” (touching first one ear and then the other), “there was a huge and yawning gash.” “Pleasant,” replies she, with a slight shiver. “I never saw any one dead,” continue I earnestly, “never until last night. I had not the faintest idea how dead people looked, even people who died quietly, nor has any picture ever given me at all a clear conception of death’s dread look. How then could I have _imagined_ the hideous contraction and distortion of feature, the staring starting open eyes--glazed yet agonized--the tightly clenched teeth that go to make up the picture, that is _now, this very minute_, standing out in ugly vividness before my mind’s eye?” I stop, but she does not avail herself of the pause to make any remark, neither does she look any longer at all laughingly inclined.