Page:Traits and Trials.pdf/293

Rh her with a passionate burst of tears, to love me, and only me.

We slept in a sort of gallery off the nursery, and the next morning I was up with the earliest day-break. Taking the greatest care not to awaken my companions, I put on my clothes as well as I could, and stole down stairs. It was scarcely light through the closed windows, and the shadows took all fantastic semblances, and one or two of the chance rays fell upon the pictures in the hall, giving them strange and distorted likenesses. There was one stately lady in black, with a huge white ruff that encircled a face yet paler. The eyes seemed to follow me wherever I moved; cold, glassy, immoveable eyes, which looked upon, as if they hated, the little trembling thing that was creeping along below. Suddenly a noise like thunder, at least such it seemed in my ears, rang through the hall. I clung to the oaken bannisters of the staircase, my very heart died within me, and I could scarcely raise my head from the place in which