"Only it was in a dream! A dream that I had, almost at the very hour he was treacherously stabbed to death."
As she spoke she leant forward a little towards him, with her eyes still distended; leant forward gazing into his face; and as she did so he felt the blood curdling in his veins!
"This," he said, trying to speak calmly, "is madness, a frenzy begotten of your state of mind at hearing----"
"It is no frenzy, no madness," she said, speaking in a strange, monotonous tone, and still with the intent gaze in her hazel eyes. "No, it is the fact. On that night--that night of death--he stood before me once again and bade me farewell for ever in this world, and then I saw--oh, my God!--his murderer spring upon him, and----"
"And that murderer was?" her lover interrupted, quivering with excitement.
"Unhappily, I do not know--not yet, at least, but I shall do so some day." She had risen now, and was standing before him pale and erect. The long white peignoir that she wore clung to her delicate, supple figure, making her look unusually tall; and she appeared to her lover like some ancient classic figure vowing vengeance on the guilty. As she stood thus, with a fixed look of certainty on her face, and prophesied that some day she should know the man who had done this deed, she might have been Cassandra come back to the world again.
"His face was shrouded," she went on, "as all murderers shroud their faces, I think; but his form I knew. I am thinking--I have thought and thought for hours by day and night--where I have seen that form before. And in some unexpected moment remembrance will come to me."
"Even though it does, I am afraid the remembrance will hardly bring the murderer to justice," Penlyn said. "A man can scarcely be convicted of a reality by a dream."
"No," she answered, "he cannot, I suppose. But it will tell me who that man is, and then----and then----"
"And then?" Penlyn interrupted.