Time passed on leaden footsteps to the impatient young creature whose life hitherto had held every pleasure that love and wealth combined could lavish on its beautiful idol.
Noon brought Haidee and her dinner. Wearied by the length of the sultry day and her own vexing thoughts, Lily scarcely tasted the food brought her.
"Take it away," she said, indifferently, "I have no appetite, Haidee."
Haidee obeyed in silence, and left her walking up and down the floor in passionate impatience. Now and then she shuddered with fear at remembering her escape of the previous night.
"I shall have to die," she thought, despairingly. "There is no hope of escape from this house. But, oh! may it not be by such a dreadful method as that."
Her meditations were suddenly interrupted by a horrible sound. It was the far-off clank of a heavy chain mingled with the anguished wail of an unearthly voice. It broke so suddenly on the stillness that Lily started in affright, the very hairs on her head seeming to stand erect in her over-mastering horror.
She had never been a believer in the supernatural, but what was that, she asked herself, with a wildly beating heart. The sounds continued, muffled by distance, yet distinctly horrible and realistic. They seemed to rise from the floor beneath her feet. She covered her ears with her hands, but the sounds penetrated to her whirling brain in spite of her efforts not to hear—dreadful sounds of woe from the suffering lips of some human or inhuman creature. All the while the heavy chain seemed clanking in unison with the voice.
Was Haidee's ghost-story true after all, Lily asked herself, in doubt and bewilderment. No, she would not believe it. Only the narrow-minded and superstitious believed in such things. Suddenly the solution of the mystery broke on her mind like the light of an inspiration. She understood Haidee's anxiety that she should believe in the unearthly nature of the sound she was likely to hear.
"It is nothing supernatural," she said to herself, firmly. "I am not the only prisoner in this house. Some poor being, more wretchedly treated even than myself, perhaps driven to madness, as they will probably drive me, is confined in some loathsome dungeon below me, and Haidee does not wish me to know it."