With a strong effort of the will, she controlled herself sufficiently to enable her to approach and examine him. He was not dead, as she had at first supposed; but he was in a very death-like sleep.
She arose to her feet, and clasped her forehead with both hands while she tried to think. What could these things mean? The unnatural exhilaration of their little party on the previous evening; the powerful reaction that prostrated them all in heavy stupor or dreamless sleep, that had lasted some fifteen hours; the ghastly procession she had seen issue from the open door of the old vault, and march slowly down the east wall of the church, past all the gothic windows, and disappear through the front door; the spell that had so deeply bound her own faculties, that she had neither the power nor the will to call out; their visitor overtaken by sleep while on his way to mount his horse, and now lying prostrate among the gravestones? What could all these things mean?
She could not imagine.
However much she might have wished to spare her husband’s rest up to this moment, she felt that she must arouse him now. She hurried back into the church, and went up to the little couch and looked at Lyon.
He was moving restlessly, and muttering sadly in his sleep. And now she felt less reluctance to wake him from his troubled dream. She shook him gently, and called him.
He opened his eyes, gazed at her, arose up in a sitting posture, and stared around for a moment, and then seeing his wife, exclaimed:
“Oh! is it you, Sybil? What is this? the chapel seems to be turned around.” And he gazed again at the western windows, where the sun was shining, and which he mistook for the eastern, supposing the time to be morning.
“The chapel has not turned around, Lyon; but the sun has. It is late in the afternoon, and that is the declining and not the rising sun that you see.”
“Good gracious, Sybil! Have I slept so late as this? Why did you let me?”
“Because I slept myself; we all slept; even to Captain Pendleton, who must have been overpowered by sleep on his way to his horse; for I have just found him lying among the gravestones.”