d resting upon her hand,
and her eyes riveted on this picture. This night it seemed to regard her
with a sad and mournful aspect; and the large blue eyes appeared to
return her fixed gaze with the sorrowful earnestness of life.

"My head is strangely confused," she murmured, half aloud. "Into what
new extravagance will my treacherous fancy hurry me to-night? Ah me!
physical wants and mental suffering, added to this long watching, will
turn my brain."

She buried her face in her hands, and endeavored to shut out the
grotesque and phantom-like forms that seemed to dance before her. A
deathlike stillness reigned through the house, the silence alone broken
by the ticking of the great dial at the head of the staircase. There is
something inexpressibly awful in the ticking of a clock, when heard at
midnight by the lonely and anxious watcher beside the bed of death. It
is the voice of time marking its slow but certain progress towards
eternity, and warning us in solemn tones that it will soon cease to
number the hours for the sufferer for ever. Elinor trembled as she
listened to the low monotonous measured sounds; and she felt at that
moment a presentiment that her own weary pilgrimage on earth was drawing
to a close.

"Oh, Algernon!" she thought; "it may be a crime, but I sometimes think
that if I could see you once more--only once more--I could forget all
my wrongs and sufferings, and die in peace."

The unuttered thought was scarcely formed, when a slight rustling noise
shook the curtains of the bed, and the next moment a tall figure in
white glided across the room. It drew nearer, and Elinor, in spite of
the wish she had just dared to whisper to herself, struggled with the
vision, as a sleeper does with the night-mare, when the suffocating
grasp of the fiend is upon his throat. Her presence of mind forsook her,
and, with a shriek of uncontrollable terror, she flung herself across
the bed, and endeavored to awaken her husband. The place he had occupied
a few minutes before was vacant; and, raising her fear-stricken head,
she perceived, with feelings scarcely less allied to fear, that the
figure she had mistaken for the ghost of Algernon was the corporeal form
of the miser.

He was asleep, but his mind appeared to be actively employed. He drew
near the table with a cautious step, and took from beneath a broad
leathern belt, which he always wore next his skin, a small key. Elinor
sat up on the bed, and watched his movem