"For Heaven's sake, cease! You will kill yourself indeed, Miss Lawrence!" cried the physician in alarm.
But she waved him off, and sitting upright in bed continued wildly:
"I heard your voice telling them that I was dead. I heard the horrid inquest held over me. I heard the funeral service while I lay in the open coffin, unable to stir, unable to comfort my weeping loved ones. They bore me away. They locked me—me, a living, agonized human creature—into the dreadful vault with the horrible dead for companions. Ah! then, indeed, I became unconscious. I knew no more. Oh! oh! what torture, what agonies I have endured!" cried the girl, waving her white hands over her head and screaming aloud in her terrified recollection of the dreadful agonies she had borne while in her cataleptic state.
"She will kill herself indeed," muttered Pratt, hastily forcing a composing draught between her writhing lips.
She continued to rave wildly until the potent drug took effect on her overwrought system and produced a deep, unnatural slumber.
He went away and left her to the care of the witchlike old woman. She awoke toward evening and found the old woman knitting away by her bedside. The beautiful girl looked at her in wonder and fright.
"Are you a vision from another world or only a fevered phantom of my brain?" she inquired in a weak voice.
The creature only scowled at her in reply, but she rose and brought a bowl of fresh arrowroot and fed the patient, who found it very refreshing after her protracted fasting.
Old Haidee, as she was called, left the room with the empty bowl, and Lily lay still, looking about her with a vague dread creeping into her heart. Had she indeed died in that horrible vault, and was she now in another world inhabited by such hideous beings as the one who had just left her? She shuddered and closed her eyes. The sound of a footstep aroused her. A man was entering the room. It was Harold Colville. He came and stood by the bed-side, looking down at her pale face with passionate tenderness shining in his eyes.
Her white cheeks turned crimson.