! He approached the door and looked
through. A lamp, nearly spent, hung from the ceiling of a small room
which might be an office or study, or a place where papers were kept.
It had the look of an antechamber, but that it could not be, for there
was but the one door!--In the dim light he descried a vague form
leaning up against one of the walls, as if listening to something
through it! As he gazed it grew plainer to him, and he saw a face, its
eyes staring wide, which yet seemed not to see him. It was the face of
the earl. Donal felt as if in the presence of the disembodied; he
stood fascinated, nor made attempt to retire or conceal himself. The
figure turned its face to the wall, put the palms of its hands against
it, and moved them up and down, and this way and that; then looked at
them, and began to rub them against each other.

Donal came to himself. He concluded it was a case of sleepwalking. He
had read that it was dangerous to wake the sleeper, but that he seldom
came to mischief when left alone, and was about to slip away as he had
come, when the faint sound of a far-off chord crept through the
silence. The earl again laid his ear to the wall. But there was only
silence. He went through the same dumb show as before, then turned as
if to leave the place. Donal turned also, and hurriedly felt his way
to the stair. Then first he was in danger of terror; for in stealing
through the darkness from one who could find his way without his eyes,
he seemed pursued by a creature not of this world. On the stair he
went down a step or two, then lingered, and heard the earl come on it
also. He crept close to the newel, leaving the great width of the
stair free, but the steps of the earl went upward. Donal descended,
sat down again at the bottom of the stair, and began again to wait. No
sound came to him through the rest of the night. The slow hours rolled
away, and the slow light drew nearer. Now and then he was on the point
of falling into a doze, but would suddenly start wide awake, listening
through a silence that seemed to fill the whole universe and deepen
around the castle.

At length he was aware that the darkness had, unobserved of him, grown
weaker--that the approach of the light was sickening it: the dayspring
was about to take hold of the ends of the earth that the wicked might
be shaken out of its lap. He sought the long passage by which he had
come, and felt his way to the other end: it would b