So fifteen days elapsed. On the evening of the fifteenth, Marie, feeling unusually exhausted, had sunk down, without disrobing, on her couch, and at length fell into a slumber so deep and calm, that her guardians, fearing to disturb it, and aware that her dress was so loose and light, it could not annoy her, retired softly to their own chamber without arousing her. How many hours this lethargic sleep lasted, Marie knew not, but was at length broken by a dream of terror, and so unusually vivid, that its impression lasted even through the terrible reality which it heralded. She beheld Arthur Stanley on the scaffold about to receive the sentence of the law--the block, the axe, the executioner with his arm raised, and apparently already deluged in blood--the gaping crowds--all the fearful appurtenances of an execution were distinctly traced, and she thought she sprung towards Stanley, who clasped her in his arms, and the executioner, instead of endeavoring to part them, smiled grimly as rejoicing in having two victims instead of one; and as he smiled, the countenance seemed to change from being entirely unknown to the sneering features of the hated Don Luis Garcia. She seemed to cling yet closer to Stanley, and knelt with, him to receive the blow; when, at that moment, the scaffold shook violently, as by the shock of an earthquake, a dark chashm yawned beneath their feet, in the centre of which stood the spectral figure of her husband, his countenance ghastly and stern, and his arm upraised as beckoning her to join him. And then he spoke; but his voice sounded unlike his own:-- "Marie Henriquez Morales! awake, arise, and follow!" And with such extraordinary clearness did the words fall, that she started up in terror, believing they must have been spoken by her side--and they were! they might have mingled with, perhaps even created her dream. She still lay on her couch; but it seemed to have sunk down through the very floor of the apartment[A] she had occupied, and at its foot stood a figure, who, with upraised arm held before her a wooden cross. His cowl was closely drawn, and a black robe, of the coarsest serge, was secured round his waist by a hempen cord. Whether he had indeed spoken the words she had heard in her dream Marie could not tell, for they were not repeated. She saw him approach her, and she felt his strong grasp lift her from the couch, which sprung up, by the touch of some secret spring, to the place whence it had descended; and she heard no more. [Footnote A: I may be accused in this scene, of too closely imitating a somewhat similar occurrence in Anne of Geirstein. Such seeming plagiarism was scarcely possible to be avoided, when the superstitious proceedings of the _vehmic_ tribunal of Germany and the _secret_ Inquisition of Spain are represented by history as so very similar.] CHAPTER XXIV.