seeing sense was paralyzed. The seeing sense--held fast in the fetters
of its own terror--looked unchangeably straightforward, as it had looked
from the first. There she stood in the door-way, full in the path of the
figure advancing on her through the shadow, nearer and nearer, step by
step.

It came close.

The bonds of horror that held her burst asunder when it was within
arm's-length. She started back. The light of the candle on the table
fell full on its face, and showed her--Admiral Bartram.

A long, gray dressing-gown was wrapped round him. His head was
uncovered; his feet were bare. In his left hand he carried his little
basket of keys. He passed Magdalen slowly, his lips whispering without
intermission, his open eyes staring straight before him with the glassy
stare of death. His eyes revealed to her the terrifying truth. He was
walking in his sleep.

The terror of seeing him as she saw him now was not the terror she
had felt when her eyes first lighted on him--an apparition in the
moon-light, a specter in the ghostly Hall. This time she could struggle
against the shock; she could feel the depth of her own fear.

He passed her, and stopped in the middle of the room. Magdalen ventured
near enough to him to be within reach of his voice as he muttered to
himself. She ventured nearer still, and heard the name of her dead
husband fall distinctly from the sleep-walker's lips.

"Noel!" he said, in the low monotonous tones of a dreamer talking in his
sleep, "my good fellow, Noel, take it back again! It worries me day and
night. I don't know where it's safe; I don't know where to put it. Take
it back, Noel--take it back!"

As those words escaped him, he walked to the buhl cabinet. He sat down
in the chair placed before it, and searched in the basket among his
keys. Magdalen softly followed him, and stood behind his chair, waiting
with the candle in her hand. He found the key, and unlocked the cabinet.
Without an instant's hesitation, he drew out a drawer, the second of a
row. The one thing in the drawer was a folded letter. He removed it, and
put it down before him on the table. "Take it back, Noel!" he repeated,
mechanically; "take it back!"

Magdalen looked over his shoulder and read these lines, traced in her
husband's handwriting, at the top of the letter: _To be kept in your own
possession, and to be opened by yourself only on the day of my decease.
Noel Vanstone._ She saw the words plainly, with the admir