Still I stood and watched it, and it crept on slowly, slowly, like
a living thing, and growing as it came, to my very feet. I cannot
say how long I might have stood there, fascinated by it, had not
something suddenly occurred to startle me into my senses again;
for full upon the back of my right hand fell, with a sullen, heavy
sound, a second drop of blood. It stung and burnt my flesh like
molten lead, and the sharp, sudden pain it gave me shot up my arm
and shoulder, and seemed in an instant to mount into my brain and
pervade my whole being. I turned and fled from the terrible place
with a shrill cry that rang through the empty corridors and ghostly
rooms like nothing human. I did not recognise it for my own voice,
so strange it was,--so totally unlike its accustomed sound; and
now, when I recall it, I am disposed to think it was surely not
the cry of living mortal, but of that unknown Thing that passed
before the portrait, and that stood beside me even then in the
lonely room. Certain I am that the echoes of that cry had in them
something inexpressibly fiendish, and through the deathly gloom
of the mansion they came back, reverberated and repeated from a
hundred invisible corners and galleries. Now, I had to pass, on
my return, a long, broad window that lighted the principal staircase.
This window had neither shutters nor blind, and was composed of
those small square panes that were in vogue a century ago. As I
went by it, I threw a hasty, appalled glance behind me, and
distinctly saw, even through the blurred and dirty glass, the
figures of two women, one pursuing the other over the thick white
snow outside. In the rapid view I had of them, I observed only
that the first carried something in her hand that looked like a
pistol, and her long black hair streamed behind her, showing darkly
against the dead whiteness of the landscape. The arms of her
pursuer were outstretched, as though she were calling to her