He stirred and opened his drowsy eyes.
'Am I in heaven?' he asked feebly. Yet he was a man who, when he was awake and well, believed not in heaven.
The physician, sitting by his bedside, laid his hand upon his wrist. The pulse was beating strongly but quickly.
'You are in the Burg of Hohenszalras,' he answered him. 'The music you hear comes from the chapel; there is a midnight mass. A mass of thanksgiving for you.'
The heavy lids fell over the eyes of the weary man, and the dreamy sense of warmth and peace that was upon him lulled him into the indifference of slumber.
[CHAPTER III]
With the morning, though the storm had ceased and passed away, the clouds were dark, the mountains were obscured, and the rain was pouring down upon lake and land.
It was still early in the day when the stranger was aroused to the full sense of awaking in a room unknown to him; he had slept all through the night; he was refreshed and without fever. His left arm was strained, and he had many bruises; otherwise he was conscious of no hurt.
'Twice in that woman's power,' he thought, with anger, as he looked round the great tapestried chamber that sheltered him, and tried to disentangle his actual memories of the past night from the dreams that had haunted him of the Nibelungen Queen, who all night long he had seen in her golden armour, with her eyes which, like those of the Greek nymph, dazzled those on whom they gazed to madness. Dream and fact had so interwoven themselves that it was with an effort he could sever the two, awaking as he did now in an unfamiliar chamber, and surrounded with those tapestries whose colossal figures seemed the phantoms of a spirit world.