She undressed, put on the delicate nightclothes Clara had provided
for her use, said her evening prayers, looked under the bed--a
precaution taken ever since the night upon which she had discovered
the burglars--and, finding all right, she blew out her candle and
lay down. She could not sleep--many persons of nervous or mercurial
temperaments cannot do so the first night in a strange bed. Cap was
very mercurial, and the bed and room in which she lay were very
strange; for the first time since she had had a home to call her own
she was unexpectedly staying all night away from her friends, and
without their having any knowledge of her whereabouts. She was
conjecturing, half in fear and half in fun, how Old Hurricane was
taking her escapade and what he would say to her in the morning. She
was wondering to find herself in such an unforeseen position as that
of a night guest in the mysterious Hidden House--wondering whether
this was the guest chamber in which the ghost appeared to the
officer and these were the very curtains that the pale lady drew at
night. While her thoughts were thus running over the whole range of
circumstances around her singular position, sleep overtook Capitola
and speculation was lost in brighter visions.

How long she had slept and dreamed she did not know, when something
gently awakened her. She opened her eyes calmly--to meet a vision
that brave as she was, nearly froze the blood in her warm veins.

Her chamber was illumined with an intense blue flame that lighted up
every portion of the apartment with a radiance bright as day, and in
the midst of this effulgence moved a figure clothed in white--a
beautiful, pale, spectral woman, whose large, motionless black eyes,
deeply set in her death-like face, and whose long unbound black
hair, fallen upon her white raiment, were the only marks of color