a presentiment of what was to follow, beat violently, and then stopped;
life itself seemed ebbing away; cold drops stood upon his forehead; his
eyelids trembled, and the balls reeled and glazed, like those of a dying
man; a deadly fear gathered over him, so that his flesh quivered, and
every hair in his head seemed instinct with a separate life, the very
marrow of his bones crept, and his blood waxed thick and thick, as if
stagnating into an ebbless and frozen substance. He started in a wild
and unutterable terror. There stood, at the far end of the room, a dim
and thin shape like moonlight, without outline or form; still, and
indistinct, and shadowy. He gazed on, speechless and motionless; his
faculties and senses seemed locked in an unnatural trance. By degrees
the shape became clearer and clearer to his fixed and dilating eye. He
saw, as through a floating and mist-like veil, the features of Emily; but
how changed!--sunken and hueless, and set in death. The dropping lip,
from which there seemed to trickle a deep red stain like blood; the
lead-like and lifeless eye; the calm, awful, mysterious repose which
broods over the aspect of the dead;--all grew, as it were, from the hazy
cloud that encircled them for one, one brief, agonising moment, and then
as suddenly faded away. The spell passed from his senses. He sprang
from the bed with a loud cry. All was quiet. There was not a trace of
what he had witnessed. The feeble light of the skies rested upon the
spot where the apparition had stood; upon that spot he stood also. He
stamped upon the floor--it was firm beneath his footing. He passed his
hands over his body--he was awake--he was unchanged: earth, air, heaven,
were around him as before. What had thus gone over his soul to awe and
overcome it to such weakness? To these questions his reason could return
no answer. Bold by nature, and sceptical by philosophy, his mind
gradually recovered its original tone: he did not give way to conjecture;
he endeavoured to discard it; he sought by natural causes to account for
the apparition he had seen or imagined; and, as he felt the blood again