she recollected the words in the manuscript, that had
been found with this picture, and which had formerly occasioned her
so much doubt and horror. At length, she roused herself from the deep
reverie, into which this remembrance had thrown her; but, when she rose
to undress, the silence and solitude, to which she was left, at this
midnight hour, for not even a distant sound was now heard, conspired
with the impression the subject she had been considering had given to
her mind, to appall her. Annette's hints, too, concerning this chamber,
simple as they were, had not failed to affect her, since they followed
a circumstance of peculiar horror, which she herself had witnessed, and
since the scene of this was a chamber nearly adjoining her own.

The door of the stair-case was, perhaps, a subject of more reasonable
alarm, and she now began to apprehend, such was the aptitude of her
fears, that this stair-case had some private communication with the
apartment, which she shuddered even to remember. Determined not to
undress, she lay down to sleep in her clothes, with her late father's
dog, the faithful MANCHON, at the foot of the bed, whom she considered
as a kind of guard.

Thus circumstanced, she tried to banish reflection, but her busy fancy
would still hover over the subjects of her interest, and she heard the
clock of the castle strike two, before she closed her eyes.

From the disturbed slumber, into which she then sunk, she was soon
awakened by a noise, which seemed to arise within her chamber; but the
silence, that prevailed, as she fearfully listened, inclined her to
believe, that she had been alarmed by such sounds as sometimes occur in
dreams, and she laid her head again upon the pillow.

A return of the noise again disturbed her; it seemed to come from that
part of the room, which communicated with the private stair-case, and
she instantly remembered the odd circumstance of the door having been
fastened, during the preceding night, by some unknown hand. Her late
alarming suspicion, concerning its communication, also occurred to her.
Her heart became faint with terror. Half raising herself from the bed,
and gently drawing aside the curtain, she looked towards the door of the
stair-case, but the lamp, that burnt on the hearth, spread so feeble a
light through the apartment, that the remote parts of it were lost in
shadow. The noise, however, which, she was convinced, came from the
door, continued. It seemed like