"None nearer than three miles ma'am, for the farm-men live at a distance, save old Thomas in the last cottage you passed, but he is bed-ridden. My widow daughter, Griffith's mother, was with me till she took ill, two winters ago, and died before the doctor could get to her. Yes, it is lonesome like in winter to be sure. It's not often that gentry like you, miss, care to be in these parts so late in the year." Further inquiries elicited that the nearest church was a good five miles off, that there was no doctor nearer than Llanfar, that the butcher only came in the winter once a fortnight and that irregularly; in consequence of which the Black Nesters had often to depend upon their own scanty resources, the roads being almost impassable in stormy weather. "Don't you think it feels rather dreary, Helen?" said Edith, as she was falling asleep. "_Eerie_, rather, I should say," replied her sister, "but that, you know, is the beauty of it. In the morning, I daresay, it will look bright enough, but I confess I do not like that clock. Listen, can't you hear its ticking, faintly, even here, at the end of that long passage?" "What clock do you mean? I saw no clock," said Edith, but almost before Helen could answer, her soft regular breathing told that she was asleep. Helen however, could not so quickly compose herself. She felt excited and vaguely uneasy; and when she at last fell asleep, it was only to have her discomfort increased, by absurd, yet alarming dreams. With them all the ugly clock was grotesquely intermingled. Sometimes it was herself, sometimes Edith, and once Malcolm, whom she fancied in some position of terrible peril, always associated with the clock, and at last she awoke with a half-smothered scream of horror at the most frightful dream of all; in which the "strange gentleman," their fellow-lodger, was pursuing her with a veil over his face, which just as he caught her fell off, and disclosed, horrible to relate, the face on the clock. Edith started up as Helen convulsively clutched her, and exclaiming, "What in the world is the matter?" really thought Helen was going out of her mind when she replied, "That horrible clock;" and as she spoke, as if invoked, the clock began to strike: "One, two, three, four," and so on. "Is it never going to stop?" said Helen. Poor Edith, half asleep still, listened with her. "Edith, I am almost certain that clock struck _thirteen_," said Helen in an awe-struck voice; and then they heard a door shut at the end of the passage. "Helen, you have been dreaming, and you are only half awake now," said Edith. "It is not like you to waken me in this frightening way, please let me go to sleep." "I am very sorry," said Helen penitently, and she too closed her eyes and tried hard to go to sleep, which of course she did, as soon as she left off trying, and had made up her mind to lie awake till daylight.