"Elsie, did you speak? did you laugh?" she calls out to her maid in the dressing-room; but Elsie, absorbed in the prosaic business of packing, does not hear her voice, and in a moment the countess falls back upon her pillow, chiding herself for nervousness. "It was a foolish fancy, merely," she tells herself. "I must not let my nervous thoughts run on like this through my terror of that mysterious burial. I will compose myself to sleep. The hour is getting late. Perhaps Elsie has finished her work and gone." Once more she vainly tries to lose herself in sleep, but her heart beats in her ears, her temples throb, some strange, alien, agitating influence controls her mind, banishing rest and repose. She puts her hands over her ears, in mortal dread of hearing that low, eerie, unearthly cackle of malicious mirth again, and shuts her eyes as if in dread of seeing some strange, unwelcome vision start out from the shadowy hangings of the darkened room. "Surely I am going mad under the weight of my troubles," she says to herself, half-fearfully. "This sleeplessness, these weird, unearthly fancies must be the premonitions of reason tottering on its throne." The minutes pass. Gradually Lady Vera becomes conscious of a delicate, subtle odor floating lightly through the room. She does not recognize it as a perfume. It is simply an odor, faintly sickening, yet strangely soothing to her excited senses. Her eyelids fall more heavily. She seems to sleep. Sleeping, a hideous vision comes to Lady Vera. A dark-robed, creeping figure seems to start from the black shadows at the furthest corner of the room and float across the floor to her bedside. It is the form of a tall woman, with a hooded head and masked face, but through the small holes of the mask two murderous black eyes glare hatred upon her, the malevolent eyes of Marcia Cleveland. Vera tries to start, to cry out, but she is motionless, dumb, bound hand and foot by the spell of that subtle, sickening drug diffused through the room, and which grows stronger as Marcia Cleveland's snowy handkerchief flutters lightly in her hand. All this Lady Vera notes in her strange dream, with feelings of unutterable horror and despair. She tries to awake, to open her dazed eyes fully, to utter some sound from her poor, parched lips, but they refuse to obey her will. And still those murderous black eyes glare with devilish hatred upon her through the narrow slits in the mask. Surely that evil glare is baleful enough to kill her of itself, Vera thinks despairingly, but even at that instant the woman's hand is drawn backward and upward, and in her murderous grasp glitters the flashing blade of a dagger poised above the bare, uncovered breast of the helpless victim, and this time with a last, vain, frenzied effort to call on God for protection, Vera loses sight and consciousness, and lies helpless at the mercy of her deadly foe.