Suddenly I awoke with a start! It seemed to , me that I had been aroused from slumber as by the shock of a galvanic battery. I trembled even after I was awake as with a vague terror, of which I should have felt ashamed had I not ascribed it to a hot supper and the nightmare. I looked around the room and upon the beautiful picture. The fire was burning down low, and the flame flashed up and down upon the opposite portrait, giving a convulsive emotion to the features, as of sobbing. I looked at the sorrowful sobbing face with a feeling of deep pity, as though it had been the living sufferer that it seemed. There was such an indescribable look of life, love, anguish, on the beautiful features, I felt a dreamy, mysterious, but intense desire to wipe away the tears from that pictured face. It was a good, while before I could get to sleep. That beautiful countenance, silently convulsed in the fire-light, fascinated me. If I determinedly closed my eyes, they would fly open again, and fix upon the pictured sufferer. Nay, even when my eyes were closed, the lovely face still present to my mind, and it seemed to me to be heartless to go to sleep with such an imag of beauty, love, and sorrow before me. I was too

imaginative. Well! the time, place, and circumstances, made me so.

At last I fell asleep indeed; but through my dreams still slowly moved the image on the wallbeautiful, good, loving, suffering, as I felt her to have been; and with her moved another being-a perfect spectre, that might have been the consort of Death on the Pale Horse-an old, decrepid, livid hag, with a malign countenance and gibbering laugh, whose look chilled and whose touch froze my blood with horror. Suddenly a noise, a fall, a smothered cry, awoke me, and, starting up in my bed, I saw in the red firelight, between the chimney and the side of my bed, the very hag of my dream, livid! malignant! gibbering! struggling violently against Wolfgang Wallraven, who, himself an embodied typhon, with a wild, angry blaze in his light-gray eyes, held her.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MYSTERY DEEPENS.

UNOBSERVED by him, I, after the first involuntary start, had fallen back upon my pillow.

The conflict was too unequal to last above a minute. It was a deadly, silent struggle. He evidently wished to secure without hurting her, or making the least noise. He quickly succeeded in mastering and bearing her out of the room.

Soon he came softly back. I was lying still; he evidently inferred that I was asleep; for, after throwing a quick, penetrating glance at me, and looking hurried around the chamber, he silently retired, cautiously closing the door after him.

You may judge that I slept no more that night. I scarcely knew with certainty at what point to separate my sinister dream from the mysterious reality; and doubts, and even anxious fears agitatated me. Who was that malign old hag? How came she in the dead hours of the night into my sleeping-room? What motive brought her there? How had Wolfgang known of her visit? Or, which had come first, and which had followed the other? Or, possibly, had they come together, and for what purpose? What meant that deadly struggle? What meant that look of agonized dread and terrible purpose upon the ghastly face of Wolfgang. The look of unutterable hatred and determined malignity upon the fiendish features of the beldame ?

I am no coward, but I say that I turned ice cold with horror-not so much at what might have happened to either of the mortal foes, as at the passion silently raging in the bosoms of both.

All was dark and still in my room now. The lurid dull red glow of the smouldering coals on the hearth revealed nothing. Even the image on the wall was invisible in the deepening shadows of that darkest hour that precedes the dawn of day. I lay in the misery of an energetic acutely anxious mind, fretting itself against the forced inactivity of the body.

At length the unknown sounds that usher in the earliest dawn of morning began to be heard.

I arose, drew on my dressing-gown, and taking some dry oak logs from a wood pile near the fireplace, threw them upon the smouldering coals, which soon kindled them into a cheerful and genial blaze. As, however, the room was yet too dusky, I went to the windows to open the shutters. I had some difficulty in hoisting the windows and in pushing open the shutters, for they were blockaded with snow and ice. When I did so, however, the frozen snow fell rattling down to the ground, and the sudden dazzling sunbeams flashing in, nearly blinded me with light.

When I could look out, however, I saw that the dark and heavy clouds of the preceding day had not fallen in a deluge of rain as had been predicted, but during the still and silent hours of the night had noiselessly descended in one of those tremendous falls of snow that furnish paragraphs for the marvelous department of the newspapers of the day, and make data in the history of a lifetime. All around stretched fields of frozen snow, the great depth of which might be partly guessed at by the tops of high gate-posts sticking a few inches above the surface, and marking, the site of a buried line of fence-fields of crusted and sparkling snow, which flashed off in undulating radiance to the circle of mountains that shut in this white, cup-shaped dell, and whose icy peaks scintillated against the cold, blue horizon. This vast snow-cup, snow-pit, snow-dell-flashing, sparkling, scintillating, dazzling, glanced brighter in the reflected rays of the morning sun than the winter sky above.

It was certain that we were immured in this snow-glen, within the confines of these closely circling and ice-cumbered mountains, for an indefinite number of days. There would be no foxhunting that day, or that week. That was