he contemplated a visit to the mysterious
closet--the dark cabinet of horrible secrets, in order to ascertain
whether curiosity had triumphed over Francisco's prudence, or if any one
indeed had violated the loneliness of that chamber in which the late
Count of Riverola, had breathed his last. She accordingly took a lamp in
her hand, for it was now far advanced in the evening, and proceeded to
the apartment where a father's dying injunctions had been given to her
brother, and which that father and that brother had so little suspected
to have been heard and greedily drunk in by her ears. The door of the
room was locked; Nisida accordingly proceeded forthwith to her brother's
chamber; and there, in a secret place where she knew he had been
accustomed to keep papers or valuables, she found the key of the chamber
containing the mysterious closet, but not the key of the closet itself.
Of this latter circumstance she was glad; inasmuch as she conceived that
he had adopted her counsel to carry it invariably secured about his
person, so that no prying domestics might use it in his absence.
Returning, therefore, with the one key which she had found, she entered
the apartment where her father had breathed his last.

Unchanged was its appearance, in mournfulness and gloom unchanged, in
arrangements and features precisely the same as when she last was there,
on the night when she intercepted the banditti in their predatory visit.
She drew aside the hangings of the bed, a cloud of dust flew out--and
for a few moments she stood gazing on the couch where the dark spirit of
her sire had fled from its mortal tenement! And as she still lingered
near the bed, the remembrance of the death-scene came so vividly back to
her mind, that for an instant she fancied she beheld the cold, stern,
relentless countenance of the late Count of Riverola upon the pillow;
and she turned away more in loathing and abhorrence than alarm, for
through her brain flashed in dread association with his memory, the
awful words--"And as the merciless scalpel hacked and hewed away at the
still almost palpitating flesh of the murdered man, in whose breast the
dagger remained deeply buried--a ferocious joy--a savage, hyena-like
triumph filled my soul; and I experienced no remorse for the deed I had
done!"

Yes, she turned aside, and was advancing rapidly toward the mysterious
closet, when--holy God!--was it reality or imagination? Was it a human
being or a specter from