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 traces of the shadow.  It was there, however, no longer; and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed.  Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia—­and then came back upon my heart, with the turbulent violence of a flood, the whole of that unutterable woe with which I had regarded her thus enshrouded.  The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena.

It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery.  I felt that it came from the bed of ebony—­the bed of death.  I listened in an agony of superstitious terror—­but there was no repetition of the sound.  I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse—­but there was not the slightest perceptible.  Yet I could not have been deceived.  I had heard the noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me.  I resolutely and perseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body.  Many minutes