After that, when all the fires of that vivid illumination had burned out in the park, and were quenched in the castle, a bright star seemed wandering up and down the vast building; now at one window, then at another, lighting it up with fitful gleams, then leaving it in darkness, and appearing again in some far off casement.
Once or twice the form of a woman in white cast its cloudy outline across the plate glass of an unshuttered window; but no person was in the park to observe her, and she wandered on with a lamp in her firm hand, which brightened over the pallid outlines of her face, and kindled up her night drapery like sunshine over drifted snow. Up and down along the corridors, and through the long drawing-room, the figure swept, carrying her lamp, and moving noiselessly over the floor with her white, naked feet.
Upon that unconscious face a look of deep pain had stamped itself in place of haughty triumph, and the wide open black eyes had a far-off look, as if their glance could penetrate the walls and the very sky beyond.
On and on the woman wandered, till she came to a closed door in one of the corridors. Here she paused, laid her right hand on the silver knob, and turned it so noiselessly that, when the door opened, it seemed like the action of a ghost.
The room was darkened from even the faint light of the stars by sweeping draperies of silk, which glowed out redly as the lamp light fell upon it in flashes, as if suddenly drenched with wine.
A high ebony bedstead stood in the centre of this noble room, canopied half way over, and draped like the windows, so that a red gleam fell upon the whiteness of the counterpane as the light of that lamp fell upon it.
A man lay profoundly sleeping on this bed—a handsome, middle-aged man, whose thick brown beard showed soft gleams of silver in it, and whose hair, though waving and bright, was growing thin on the top of his head.
The man appeared to sleep heavily, and a smile lay on his lips; but a look of habitual care had written itself on his forehead, and his mouth was surrounded by stern, hard lines, that seemed graven there with steel.
The woman stood by this sleeping man, gazing on him with the far-off look of a ghost. She turned at last, and set the light down on a console, where it fell less distinctly on the pillow where that head was lying. Then she crept back and sat down on the side of the bed, so close to the unconscious sleeper that her shadow fell across him. Slowly, as if she had been touching a serpent, her hand crept stealthily toward that which lay in the supine carelessness of sleep on the white counterpane. She touched it at last, but started back. A blood-red stain from the curtain fell across it as her bending form let the light stream through the silk.
The woman drew back and passed her left hand quickly over that which had touched the sleeping man. Again and again she rubbed one hand over the other, muttering to herself.