And sleeping, he dreamed. He was in a comfortably furnished home, and was recovering from a serious illness. Just well enough to be up, he sat in a chair made comfortable for his back by pillows. He had been reading, and, as he saw Sibyl enter the room in a neat-fitting white-merino morning-robe, he let his book fall to the floor, while she dropped on her knees beside him, and, with loving anxiety beaming from her brilliant eyes, glanced into his face.
Then the scene abruptly changed, and he seemed wandering on the verge of a precipice, treading a path so narrow and precarious that a single false step would hurl him to certain destruction down the unfathomable gulf below. Where that path was to end he knew not, but a white robed siren, with shining golden hair and smiling eyes and lips, went before him and lured him on. An inward voice seemed whispering him to beware, that the path he was treading must end in death; but the smiling eyes of the golden-haired tempter were beaming upon him, and the voice whispered in vain. Above every steep crag, as he passed, the wild black eyes of Sibyl seemed gleaming with deadly hatred and fierce malignity on him; but even those dark, warning eyes could not tempt him back from the road he was treading. Suddenly the siren vanished; he sprang after her, and fell down, down, down into the awful gulf below.
A wild laugh rang out on the air, and Sibyl was bending above him, holding a glittering dagger to his heart, while her great black eyes burned like two flames. He held out his hands for mercy, but she only mocked him with her deriding black eyes, and raised the knife to plunge it into his heart.
With a cry of terror he awoke to find it not all a dream.
An icy cold hand lay on his face.
He sprang up in bed with a thrill of horror, to behold a white, wild face, with vacant, unearthly eyes and long, streaming hair bending over him.
Paralyzed by the sudden apparition, he sat, unable to move or speak, and ere he could fully recover his senses the ghostly visitant was gone.
He sprang out of bed and seized the door. It was locked as he had left it, and, with his blood curdling, he stood rooted to the ground.
Morally and physically Willard Drummond was brave, but this midnight visit from a supernatural being might have chilled the blood of the most undaunted. Sleep now was out of the question; therefore, seating himself by the window, he prepared to wait for the approach of morning. The moon was already sinking behind the western horizon, bathing the placid river in its soft beams. The morning star shone bright and serene in the cloudless blue sky; and, gazing on the calm beauty without, the young man's pulse ceased its feverish throbbings, and he began striving to account for this ghostly visit by natural means.
But he strove in vain. The door was firmly locked, and there could be no secret passage through those strong, oaken walls. Then he arose, and carefully searched every crevice in the room that could by any possibility be made a hiding-place of. Still in vain. The room contained no living thing but himself.