e all my bones to shake," says Job in one of his
most dismal moments; and now to Dysart this strange, unaccountable chill
feeling comes. Insensibly, born of the hour and the silence only, and
with no smallest dread of things intangible.

The small clock on the mantel-piece sends forth a tiny chime, so
delicate that in broad daylight, with broader views in the listeners, it
might have gone unheard. Now it strikes upon the motionless air as
loudly as though it were the crack of doom. Poor little clock!
struggling to be acknowledged for twelve long years of nights and days,
now is your revenge--the fruition of all your small ambitious desires.

Dysart starts violently at the sound of it. It is of importance, this
little clock. It has wakened him to real life again. He has taken a step
toward the door and the bed, the very idea of which up to this has been
treated by him with ignominy, when--a sound in the hall outside stays
him.

An unmistakable step, but so light as to suggest the idea of burglars.
Dysart's spirits rise. The melancholy of a moment since deserts him. He
looks round for the poker--that national, universal mode of defence when
our castles are invaded by the "masked man."

He has not time, however, to reach it before the handle of the door is
slowly turned--before the door is as slowly opened, and----

"What is this?"

For a second Dysart's heart seems to stop beating. He can only gaze
spellbound at this figure, clad all in white, that walks deliberately
into the room, and seemingly directly toward him. It is Joyce! Joyce!

CHAPTER XXIX.

"Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive."

Is she dead or still living? Dysart, calmed now, indeed, gazes at her
with a heart contracted. Great heaven! how like death she looks, and
yet--he knows she is still in the flesh. How strangely her eyes gleam. A
dull gleam and so passionless. Her brown hair--not altogether fallen
down her back, but loosened from its hairpins, and hanging in a soft
heavy knot behind her head--gives an additional pallor to her already
too white face. The open eyes are looking straight before them,
unseeing. Her step is slow, mechanical, unearthly. It is only indeed
when she lays the candle she holds upon the edge of the table, the
extreme edge, that he knows she is asleep, and walking in a dreamland
that to waking mortals