“And yet,” continue I, with a voice shaken by emotion, “it was _you_, _very_ you, not partly you and partly some one else, as is mostly the case in dreams, but as much _you_, as the _you_ I am touching now” (laying my finger on her arm as I speak). “And my old man, Robin,” says poor Jane, rather tearfully, after a moment’s silence, “what about him? Did you see him? Was he dead too?” “It was evidently he whom I had heard struggling and crying,” I answer with a strong shudder, which I cannot keep down, “for it was clear that he had fought for his life. He was lying half on the bed and half on the floor, and one clenched hand was grasping a great piece of the sheet; he was lying head downwards, as if, after his last struggle, he had fallen forwards. All his grey hair was reddened and stained, and I could see that the rift in his throat was as deep as that in yours.” “I wish you would stop,” cries Jane, pale as ashes, and speaking with an accent of unwilling terror; “you are making me quite sick!” “I _must_ finish,” I answer earnestly, “since it has come in time I am sure it has come for some purpose. Listen to me till the end; it is very near.” She does not speak, and I take her silence for assent. “I was staring at you both in a stony way,” I go on, a feeling--if I felt at all--that I was turning idiotic with horror--standing in exactly the same spot, with my neck craned to look round the door, and my eyes unable to stir from that hideous scarlet bed, when a slight noise, as of some one cautiously stepping on the carpet, turned my stony terror into a living quivering agony. I looked and saw a man with his back towards me walking across the room from the bed to the dressing-table. He was dressed in the dirty fustian of an ordinary workman, and in his hand he held a red wet sickle. When he reached the dressing-table he laid it down on the floor beside him, and began to collect all the rings, open the cases of the bracelets, and hurry the trinkets of all sorts into his pockets. While he was thus busy I caught a full view of the reflection of the face in the glass---- I stop for breath, my heart is panting almost as hardly as it seemed to pant during the awful moments I am describing. “What was he like--what was he like?” cries Jane, greatly excited. “Did you see him distinctly enough to recollect his features again? Would you know him again if you saw him?” “Should I know my own face if I saw it in the glass?” I ask scornfully. “I see every line of it _now_ more clearly than I do yours, though that is before my eyes, and the other only before my memory----” “Well, what was he like?--be quick, for heaven’s sake.”