whose rough setting gave so firm a grasp to my hand.  Was the blade as fair as the covering, I wondered?  A little resistance at first, and then the long thin steel slid easily out.  Sharp, and bright, and finely tempered it looked with its deadly, tapering point.  Stains, dull and irregular, crossed the fine engraving on its surface and dimmed its polish.  I bent to examine them more closely, and as I did so a sudden stronger gust of wind blew out the candle.  I shuddered a little at the darkness and looked up.  But it did not matter:  the curtain was still drawn away from the window opposite my bedside, and through it a flood of moonlight was pouring in upon floor and bed.

Putting the sheath down upon the table, I walked to the window to examine the knife more closely by that pale light.  How gloriously brilliant it was! darkened now and again by the quickly passing shadows of wind-driven clouds.  At least so I thought, and I glanced up and out of the window to see them.  A black world met my gaze.  Neither moon was there nor moonlight:  the broad silver beam in which I stood stretched no farther than the window.  I caught my breath, and my limbs stiffened as I looked.  No moon, no cloud, no movement in the clear, calm, starlit sky; while still the ghastly light stretched round me, and the spectral shadows drifted across the room.

But it was not all dark outside:  one spot caught my eye, bright with a livid unearthly brightness—­the Dead Stone shining out into the night like an ember from hell’s furnace!  There was a horrid semblance of life in the light,—­a palpitating, breathing glow,—­ and my pulses beat in time to it, till I seemed to be drawing it into my veins.  It had no warmth, and as it entered my blood my heart grew colder, and my muscles more rigid.  My fingers clutched the dagger-hilt till its jeweled roughness pressed painfully into my palm.  All the strength of my strained powers seemed gathered in that grasp, and the more tightly I held the more vividly did the rock gleam and quiver with infernal life.  The dead woman!  The dead woman!  What had I to do with her?  Let her bones rest in the filth of their own decay,—­out there under the accursed stone.

And now the noise of the wind lessens in my ears.  Let it go on,—­ yes, louder and wilder, drowning my senses in its tumult.  What is there with me in the room—­the great empty room behind me?  Nothing; only the cabinet with its waving doors.  They are waving to and fro, to and fro—­I know it.  But there is no other life in the room but that—­no, no; no other life in the room but that.

Oh! don’t let the wind stop.  I can’t hear anything while it goes on;—­but if it stops!  Ah! the gusts grow weaker, struggling, forced into rest.  Now—­now—­they have ceased.

Silence!

A fearful pause.

What is that that I hear?  There, behind me in the room?

Do I hear it?  Is there anything?