It must have lasted long, for when I wakened my candle had burnt out; my
father, having quite forgotten me, was gone, and the room was dark and
deserted. I felt cold and a little stiff, and for some seconds did not know
where I was.

I had been wakened, I suppose, by a sound which I now distinctly heard, to
my great terror, approaching. There was a rustling; there was a breathing.
I heard a creaking upon the plank that always creaked when walked upon in
the passage. I held my breath and listened, and coiled myself up in the
innermost recess of my little chamber.

Sudden and sharp, a light shone in from the nearly-closed study door. It
shone angularly on the ceiling like a letter L reversed. There was a pause.
Then some one knocked softly at the door, which after another pause was
slowly pushed open. I expected, I think, to see the dreaded figure of
the linkman. I was scarcely less frightened to see that of Madame de la
Rougierre. She was dressed in a sort of grey silk, which she called her
Chinese silk--precisely as she had been in the daytime. In fact, I do not
think she had undressed. She had no shoes on. Otherwise her toilet was
deficient in nothing. Her wide mouth was grimly closed, and she stood
scowling into the room with a searching and pallid scrutiny, the candle
held high above her head at the full stretch of her arm.

Placed as I was in a deep recess, and in a seat hardly raised above the
level of the floor, I escaped her, although it seemed to me for some
seconds, as I gazed on this spectre, that our eyes actually met.

I sat without breathing or winking, staring upon the formidable image which
with upstretched arm, and the sharp lights and hard shadows thrown upon her
corrugated features, looked like a sorceress watching for the effect of a