I awoke with a start to find the gray light of a raw misty morning falling upon and showing up our wretched group. The Duchess's head was hidden in her cloak; her husband's had sunk on his breast; but Mistress Anne--I looked at her and shuddered. Had she sat so all night? Sat staring with that stony face of pain, and those tearless eyes on the moonlight, on the darkness which had been before the dawn, on the cold first rays of morning? Stared on all alike, and seen none? I shuddered and peered at her, alarmed, doubtful, wondering, asking myself what this was that had happened to her. Had fear and cold killed her, or turned her brain? "Anne!" I said timidly. "Anne!" She did not answer nor turn; nor did the fixed gaze of her eyes waver. I thought she did not hear. "Anne!" I cried again, so loudly that the Duchess stirred, and muttered something in her sleep. But the girl showed no sign of consciousness. I put out my hand and touched her. She turned sharply and saw me, and in an instant drew her skirt away with a gesture of such dread, loathing repulsion as froze me; while a violent shudder convulsed her whole frame. Afterward she seemed unable to withdraw her eyes from me, but sat in the same attitude, gazing at me with a fixed look of horror, as one might gaze at a serpent, while tremor after tremor shook her. I was frightened and puzzled, and was still staring at her, wondering what I had done, when a footstep fell on the road outside and called away my attention. I turned from her to see a man's figure looming dark in the doorway. He looked at us--I suppose he had found the horses outside--gazing in surprise at the queer group. I bade him good-morning in Dutch, and he answered as well as his astonishment would let him. He was a short, stout fellow, with a big face, capable of expressing a good deal of astonishment. He seemed to be a peasant or farmer. "What do you here?" he continued, his guttural phrases tolerably intelligible to me. I explained as clearly as I could that we were on the way to Wesel. Then I awoke the Duchess and her husband, and stretching our chilled and aching limbs, we went outside, the man still gazing at us. Alas! the day was not much better than the night. We could see but a very little way, a couple of hundred yards round us only. The rest was mist--all mist. We appealed to the man for food and shelter, and he nodded, and, obeying his signs rather than his words, we kicked up our starved beasts and plodded out into the fog by his side. Anne mounted silently and without objection, but it was plain that something strange had happened to her. Her condition was unnatural. The Duchess gazed at her very anxiously, and, getting no answers, or very scanty ones, to her questions, shook her head gravely.