antecedents, he had so frankly owned himself a natural son, a nobody, a
traveller, an idler; his expenses, though lavish, were so unostentatious,
so regularly defrayed; he was so wholly the reverse of the character
assigned to criminals, that it seemed as absurd to bring a charge of
homicide against a butterfly or a goldfinch as against this seemingly
innocent and delightful favourite of humanity and nature.

However, Mr. Stanton said little or nothing, and shortly afterwards left
me, with a dry expression of hope that my innocence would be cleared in
spite of evidence that, he was bound to say, was of the most serious
character.

I was exhausted. I fell into a profound sleep early that night; it might
be a little after twelve when I woke, and woke as fully, as completely, as
much restored to life and consciousness, as it was then my habit to be at
the break of day. And so waking, I saw, on the wall opposite my bed, the
same luminous phantom I had seen in the wizard's study at Derval Court. I
have read in Scandinavian legends of an apparition called the Scin-Laeca,
or shining corpse. It is supposed in the northern superstition, sometimes
to haunt sepulchres, sometimes to foretell doom. It is the spectre of a
human body seen in a phosphoric light; and so exactly did this phantom
correspond to the description of such an apparition in Scandinavian fable
that I knew not how to give it a better name than that of Scin-Laeca,--the
shining corpse.

There it was before me, corpse-like, yet not dead; there, as in the
haunted study of the wizard Forman!--the form and the face of Margrave.
Constitutionally, my nerves are strong, and my temper hardy, and now I was
resolved to battle against any impression which my senses might receive
from my own deluding fancies. Things that witnessed for the first time