bedside. Her dresses, suspended from a row
of hooks in the corner--and showing, in gentle swells and curves, the
lithe, graceful form of the little wearer, like moulds,--would have
looked to any open eye, that dreadful night, like women hanging against
the wall. This startling idea would have been helped along by two or
three shadowy bonnets depending from pegs above them. The white
somethings carelessly tossed over a chair near the head of the bed, were
no longer the garments of youth, beauty, and innocence, but
graveclothes, cold, shining, shuddering, in that deathly light. The
touch of the moon, like the presence of a sexton, suggested mortality.

The narrow, single bed, with its four black posts, looked like the fatal
trestle, or bier. The slender body which lay upon it was still as death.
The head nestled motionless in a deep indentation of the pillow. A
slanting ray of the moon, coming between one of the window curtains and
the window, fell upon the face, and showed it white and waxen; the lips,
still red, parted to the gleaming teeth; and the eyes not quite covered
by the lids. One beautiful round arm curved above her head, and some of
her soft brown hair rested in the little open palm. The other stretched
down toward the centre of the bed, as if fearlessly to invite the touch
of those weird things with which imagination peoples the solemn
night--which the wakeful eye, in the still, small hours, sees moving in
the darker corners, or passing swiftly by the bedside, or hovering in
the air, wearing the semblance of one's dead friends, or filling large
portions of the room with some formless presence of unutterable
malignity and woe.

It was only sleep to which the moon thus gave the pale polish of death.
The gentle murmur of a childish breath broke the silence. The heavy
bedclothes slowly rose and fell with the mysterious pulsations of warm
life beneath. At intervals, a shudder shook the little figure of the
sleeper, her breath came louder and quicker, and her arms moved with
sudden starts. Pet was dreaming, under the joint influences of an excess
of blankets and a cup of strong tea.

She was alone in infinite space. Above, below, on all sides, was a
leaden atmosphere. Neither sun, nor moon, nor stars illumined it, but
only some dull, phosphorescent light, which seemed to be born of the
murky, stagnant air. It was such a strange, sickly, wavering gleam as
she had seen above decaying wood, fish, and other substanc