me back, there had fallen
upon him, regularly about midnight, a curiously unnatural sleepiness,
which he now believed to be caused by some narcotic administered to him
by the Countess, to enable her to get away unobserved. The darkest
suspicions and forebodings came into his mind. He thought of the
diabolical mother, and that, perhaps, her instincts had begun to awake
in her daughter. He thought of some possibility of a conjugal
infidelity. He remembered the terrible hangman's son.

It was so ordained that the very next night was to explain this
terrible mystery to him--that which alone could be the key to the
Countess's strange condition.

She herself used, every evening, to make the tea which the Count always
took before going to bed. This evening he did not take a drop of it,
and when he went to bed he had not the slightest symptom of the
sleepiness which generally came upon him as it got towards midnight.
However, he lay back on his pillows, and had all the appearance of
being fast asleep as usual.

And then the Countess rose up very quietly, with the utmost
precautions, came up to his bedside, held a lamp to his eyes, and then,
convinced that he was sound asleep, went softly out of the room.

His heart throbbed fast. He got up, put on a cloak, and went after the
Countess. It was a fine moonlight night, so that, though Aurelia had
got a considerable start of him, he could see her distinctly going
along in the distance in her white dress. She went through the park,
right on to the burying-ground, and there she disappeared at the
wall. The Count ran quickly after her in through the gate of the
burying-ground, which he found open. There, in the bright moonlight, he
saw a circle of frightful, spectral-looking creatures. Old women, half
naked, were cowering down upon the ground, and in the midst of them lay
the corpse of a man, which they were tearing at with wolfish appetite.

Aurelia was amongst them.

The Count took flight in the wildest horror, and ran, without any idea
where he was going or what he was doing, impelled by the deadliest
terror, all about the walks in the park, till he found himself at the
door of his own Castle as the day was breaking, bathed in cold
perspiration. Involuntarily, without the capability of taking hold of a
thought, he dashed up the steps, and went bursting through the passages
and into his own bedroom. There lay the Countess, to all appearance in
the deepest and sweetest of sleep