was deposited a decanter of light wine which had been
ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure
it. But, as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two
circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt
that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my
person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very
middle of the rich luster thrown from the censer, a shadow--a faint,
indefinite shadow of angelic aspect--such as might be fancied for the
shadow of a shade. But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate
dose of opium, and heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to
Rowena. Having found the wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a
gobletful, which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now
partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank
upon an ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was
then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the
carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in
the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that
I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the
atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and
ruby colored fluid. If this I saw--not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine
unhesitatingly, and I forebore to speak to her of a circumstance which
must, after all, I considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid
imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the
opium, and by the hour.

Yet I cannot conceal [Transcriber's note: The original reads "coneal".]
it from my own perception that, immediately subsequent to the fall of
the ruby drops, a rapid change for the worse took place in the disorder
of my wife; so that, on the third subsequent night, the hands of her
menials prepared her for the tomb, and on the fourth, I sat alone, with
her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamber which had received her as
my bride. Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before
me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles of the
room, upon the varying figures of the drapery, and upon the writhing of
the parti-colored fires in the censer overhead. My eyes then fell, as I
called to mind the circumstances of a former night, to the spot beneath
the glare of the censer where I had seen the faint trac