“Oh, tell us!” exclaimed both the children in duet, with all their childish interest in the marvelous excited to the highest pitch.
“It is a vision of midnight on midocean—the blackness of darkness above, below, around, beneath. Suddenly into this opaque darkness glows a spark of red light. It increases, spreads, and shoots upward, revealing—a ship on fire! Showing the deck crowded with dark figures! Only one fearfully distinct form—the form of Odalite. She stands on the top of the bulwarks, clothed in white raiment, with her arms raised on high, her face turned upward, her hair streaming!—flames around and above her, the ocean beneath. I heard her call to me, speak to me:
“‘Le, I do not want to leave you, but see! I must take the water to escape the fire!’
“And suddenly, as if the burning ship were swallowed up in the midnight sea, the vision vanished. Three times I had this vision, children. And it troubled me, but in the excitement of my home-coming I forgot it until now. Now I remember it, and receive it as a warning.”
“I can read it! I can read it!” said Wynnette, with her weird, eldritch look and tone. “I can read it, and it is just what I believed before I heard of it! Odalite is driven somehow, by some one or something, not only to marry, but want to marry, Anglesea to save herself from some evil! Oh! I feel it even in my bones! And if she is driven quite into the marriage, I tell you there will be some awful tragedy like that of the Bride of Lammermoor! Anglesea will be found in the morning with his wizen slit—I mean with his throat cut—and Odalite will be sitting in the ashes gibbering and mopping and mowing like an idiot!”
“Oh! oh! oh!” cried little Elva, covering her face with her hands and shivering through all her small frame.
“See, you have frightened the child, Wynnette! You should not say such wild, extravagant things, my dear!” said Le, rebukingly.
“I said it to fetch you! I mean I said it to make an impression on you!” retorted Wynnette.
“Oh, Le! can’t you be Young Lochinvar and carry her off from the wedding?” pleaded little Elva.
“Hardly, my darling!