and the wide expanse of moonlit
common beyond which he expected to see, he found himself looking, as it
were, through a window from the outside into a great, oak-panelled
sleeping chamber, lighted by a huge silver lamp hanging from the middle
of the painted and corniced ceiling. Against the middle of the left hand
side wall, as he was looking into the room, stood one of the huge,
heavily-draped, four-post bedsteads in which the great ones of the earth
were wont to take their rest a couple of hundred years ago. The curtains
were drawn back on both sides. In the middle of the bed lay Count
Zastrow, deathly white, with fast-closed eyes and lips, breathing
heavily as the rise and fall of the embroidered sheet and silken
coverlet which lay across his chest showed. On the right hand side stood
the Countess and the two men whom he had seen before; on the other side
stood a tall, strikingly handsome woman, whose dark imperious features
seemed strangely at variance with the severely fashioned grey dress and
the plainly arranged hair which proclaimed her either a nurse or an
upper servant.

He saw the elder of the two men lean over the bed and raise one of the
sleeper's eyelids with his thumb. The nurse took up a lighted taper by
the table beside her and passed it in front of the opened eye. The man
closed the eyelid, and turned and said something to the Countess and the
other man. The Countess nodded and smiled, not quite as a man likes to
see a woman smile, and, with a swift glance at the motionless figure on
the bed, turned away and left the room. The nurse said something to the
two men, and as the door closed behind her the scene changed again.

This time he was not looking into a window, but out of one. He was
gazing over a vast expanse of forest pierced by a broad, straight road
which led for several miles, as it seemed to him, between two dark walls
of thickly-growing pines until it ended abruptly with the forest and
opened out on a tiny sand-fringed inlet whose narrow mouth was guarded
by two little outcrops of rock half a mile to seaward.

A carriage drawn by four black horses rolled rapidly along the road,
swung out on to the beach, and stopped. Almost at the same moment a
grey-painted, six-oared boat grounded on the sandy beach. A couple of
men landed from her, and as the carriage door opened, they saluted. The
Count's two guests got out and the others entered the carriage, then one
of them got out again followed by