e moon came
clear through a high and wide skylight: the light, however, gave him no
guide. While pausing, much perplexed, and not sure that he should even
know again the door of the room he had just quitted, if venturing to
apply to his young master for a clew through such a labyrinth, he was
inexpressibly startled and appalled by a sudden apparition. A door
at one end of the corridor opened noiselessly, and a figure, at first
scarcely distinguishable, for it was robed from head to foot in a black,
shapeless garb, scarcely giving even the outline of the human form,
stole forth. Beck rubbed his eyes and crept mechanically close within
the recess of one of the doors that communicated with the passage. The
figure advanced a few steps towards him; and what words can describe
his astonishment when he beheld thus erect, and in full possession of
physical power and motion, the palsied cripple whose chair he had often
seen wheeled into the garden, and whose unhappy state was the common
topic of comment in the servants' hall! Yes, the moon from above shone
full upon that face which never, once seen, could be forgotten. And it
seemed more than mortally stern and pale, contrasted with the sable
of the strange garb, and beheld by that mournful light. Had a ghost,
indeed, risen from the dead, it could scarcely have appalled him more.
Madame Dalibard did not see the involuntary spy; for the recess in which
he had crept was on that side of the wall on which the moon's shadow
was cast. With a quick step she turned into another room, opposite
that which she had quitted, the door of which stood ajar, and vanished
noiselessly as she had appeared.

Taught suspicion by his earlier acquaintance with the "night-side" of
human nature, Beck had good cause for it here. This detection of an
imposture most familiar to his experience,--that of a pretended cripple;
the hour of the night; the evil expression on the face of the deceitful
guest; Madame Dalibard's familiar intimacy and near connection with
Varney,--Varney, the visitor to Grabman, who received no visitors but
those who desire, not to go to law, but to escape from its penalties;
Varney, who had dared to brave the resurrection man in his den, and who
seemed so fearlessly at home in abodes where nought but poverty could
protect the honest; Varney now, with that strange woman, an inmate of a
house in which the master was so young, so inexperienced, so liable to
be duped by his own generous n