-a single sound echoed through the
air, like a long note played on an exceedingly sweet silver trumpet. It
began softly--swelled to a crescendo--then died delicately away. Gueldmar
raised his head--his face was full of rapt and expectant gravity,--his
action, too, was somewhat singular, for he drew the knife from his
girdle and kissed the hilt solemnly, returning it immediately to its
sheath. At the same moment Lovisa uttered a loud cry, and flinging the
coverings from her, strove to rise from her bed. Ulrika held her
firmly,--she struggled feebly yet determinedly, gazing the while with
straining, eager, glassy eyes into the gloom of the opposite corner.

"Darkness--darkness!" she muttered hoarsely,--"and the white faces of
dead things! There--there they lie!--all still, at the foot of the black
chasm--their mouths move without sound--what--what are they saying? I
cannot hear--ask them to speak louder--louder! Ah!" and she uttered a
terrified scream that made the rafters ring. "They move!--they stretch
out their hands--cold, cold hands!--they are drawing me down to
them--down--down--to that darkness! Hold me--hold me! don't let me go to
them--Lord, Lord be merciful to me--let me live--live--" Suddenly she
drew back in deadly horror, gesticulating with her tremulous lean hands
as though it shut away the sight of some loathsome thing unveiled to her
view. "Who is it"--she asked in an awful, shuddering whisper--"who is it
that says there is no hell? _I see it_!" Still retreating backwards,
backwards--the clammy dew of death darkening her affrighted
countenance,--she turned her glazing eyes for the last time on Gueldmar.
Her lips twitched into a smile of dreadful mockery.

"May--thy gods--reward thee--Olaf Gueldmar--even--as
mine--are--rewarding--_me_!"

And with these words, her head dropped heavily on her breast. Ulrika
laid her back on her pillow, a corpse. The stern, cruel smile froze
slowly on her dead features--gradually she became, as it were, a sort of
ancient cenotaph, carved to resemble old age combined with unrepenting
evil--the straggling white hair that rested on her wrinkled forehead
looking merely like snow fallen on sculptured stone.

"Good Lord, have mercy on her soul!" murmured Ulrika piously, as she
closed the upward staring eyes, and crossed the withered hands.

"Good devil, claim thine own!" said Gueldmar, with proudly lifted arm and
quivering, disdainful lips. "Thou foolish woman! Thinkest thou thy