e still passed on; when, turning the
angle of the grey tower, she emerged again into the clear, unbroken
moonlight--the little hillocks and upright gravestones alone
disturbing the broad and level beam. She was startled from her reverie
by dull and heavy sounds near her, as though a pickaxe were employed
by invisible hands in disturbing the ground close to where she stood.
She paused a moment and listened; the blows were still falling, and
she felt the ground vibrating beneath her feet. A sudden thought
crossed her--it might be "Steenie," even at this untimely hour, plying
his accustomed vocation. He had been retarded probably by the
accidents of the day; and the occasion being urgent, according to his
own anticipations, had led him to labour so late for its completion.
It was doubtless the grave which had been so mysteriously assigned to
the lot of Egerton. A cold tremor crept upon her; she remembered the
denunciation and the uncertain fate of the victim. Even now he might
be hastening to his final account, and this horrid _ghoul_ might be
scenting the dissolution of the body that he was preparing to entomb.

"Graciously forbid it, Heaven!" she inwardly ejaculated, approaching
the grave; but so softly, that her footsteps were not heard by the
invisible workman, who was deep in the abyss of his own creating. The
blows had ceased, and the mattock was now in requisition. Shovelfuls
of earth were thrown out; thick and heavy clods were hurled forth in
rapid succession. The scene would have driven back many a timid girl;
and even some stout hearts and fierce stomachs would have shrunk from
the trial. She was within range, and almost within the grasp, of a
being whose evil dispositions were known and acknowledged--a being
whose mysterious connection with intelligences of an unfriendly nature
was universally admitted. A grave, dug in secret, peradventure during
some baneful and preternatural process, yawned before her. Midnight,
too, was nigh; and she was not devoid of apprehension--that inherent
dread of the invisible things of darkness universally bound up with
our feeble and fallen nature. Since the day of his first estrangement,
man never, even in imagination or apprehension, approaches the dark
and shadowy threshold of a world unseen without terror, lest some
supernatural communication should break forth; it seems a feeling
coeval with the curse on our first parents, when they heard "the voice
of the Lord God walking in t