"Where am I?" she languidly interrogated, sweeping her small white hand across her brow. Colville had gone, but the unwearied physician sitting by the bedside answered, calmly: "You are in good hands, Miss Lawrence. I am your physician. You have been very ill, and must not agitate yourself by asking questions yet." CHAPTER V. "You say I have been very ill?" said Lily, looking up into the dark face bending over her. "Yes, you have been near to death's door; but indeed you must not talk; you will exhaust yourself." "But I must talk," said the patient, willfully. "Why am I here? This is not my home," glancing round the poor, ill-furnished room. "Where are my father, my sister, my maid? Oh, God!" and a piercing shriek burst from her lips. "I remember everything--the murderous dagger-thrust, the horrid spell that bound me hand and foot and tongue. I could not speak, I could not move; but I heard them weeping round me; I heard----" "For Heaven's sake, cease! You will kill yourself indeed, Miss Lawrence!" cried the physician in alarm. But she waved him off, and sitting upright in bed continued wildly: "I heard your voice telling them that I was dead. I heard the horrid inquest held over me. I heard the funeral service while I lay in the open coffin, unable to stir, unable to comfort my weeping loved ones. They bore me away. They locked me--me, a living, agonized human creature--into the dreadful vault with the horrible dead for companions. Ah! then, indeed, I became unconscious. I knew no more. Oh! oh! what torture, what agonies I have endured!" cried the girl, waving her white hands over her head and screaming aloud in her terrified recollection of the dreadful agonies she had borne while in her cataleptic state. "She will kill herself indeed," muttered Pratt, hastily forcing a composing draught between her writhing lips. She continued to rave wildly until the potent drug took effect on her overwrought system and produced a deep, unnatural slumber. He went away and left her to the care of the witchlike old woman. She awoke toward evening and found the old woman knitting away by her bedside. The beautiful girl looked at her in wonder and fright. "Are you a vision from another world or only a fevered phantom of my brain?" she inquired in a weak voice. The creature only scowled at her in reply, but she rose and brought a bowl of fresh arrowroot and fed the patient, who found it very refreshing after her protracted fasting.