But it resisted all his efforts, as if its iron bars had been bedded in the solid masonry.
“No,” he answered; “your visitor, if you had one, could not possibly have entered here. See how fast the door is.”
“Lyon,” whispered Sybil, in a deep and solemn voice, “Lyon, could she possibly have come out from there?”
“Nonsense, dear! Are you thinking of ghosts?”
“This is the ‘Haunted Chapel,’ you know,” whispered Sybil.
“Bosh, my dear; you are not silly enough to believe that!”
“But my strange visitor?”
“You had no visitor, dear Sybil; you had a dream, and your dream had every feature of nightmare in it—the deep, death-like, yet half-conscious and much disturbed sleep; the sense of heavy oppression; the apparition hanging over you; the inability to awake; even the grappling at your throat, and the swift disappearance of the vision immediately upon your full awakening—all well-known features of incubus,” replied Mr. Berners. But again he thought of the shadow he had seen; now, however, only to dismiss the subject as an optical illusion.
Sybil sighed deeply.
“It is hard,” she said, “that you won’t trust to my senses in this affair.”