“As I live,” I answer, solemnly, “I know no more than the dead what you are talking about; till you woke me by calling me and catching hold of me, I was as sound asleep as the seven sleepers.”
“Is it possible that it can have been a dream?” she says, with a long sigh, for a moment loosing my arm, and covering her face with her hands. “But no—in a dream I should have been somewhere else, but I was here—here—on that bed, and he stood there,” pointing with her forefinger, “just there, between the foot of it and the window!”
She stops, panting.
“It is all that brute Wiertz,” say I, in a fury. “I wish I had been buried alive myself, before I had been fool enough to take you to see his beastly daubs.”
“Light a candle,” she says, in the same breathless way, her teeth chattering with fright. “Let us make sure that he is not hidden somewhere in the room.”
“How could he be?” say I, striking a match; “the door is locked.”
“He might have got in by the balcony,” she answers, still trembling violently.
“He would have had to have cut a very large hole in the persiennes,” say I, half-mockingly. “See, they are intact and well fastened on the inside.”
She sinks into an arm-chair, and pushes her loose soft hair from her white face.
“It was a dream then, I suppose?”