“Remember, darling—­all the blankets, and your shawl.  To-morrow morning you will wake up bright and happy, and ready to enjoy a little surprise that I shall have for you.”  He jerked his thumb toward the machine.

Pet understood him, and smiled sadly.  “You need bed more than I, father,” said she.

“Nonsense, child!” replied the old man, with a hollow laugh.  “It is not for the patient to prescribe to the physician.  There, good-night, now.”

He kissed her again with more tenderness.  “Remember,” said he, “there is a little surprise in store for you to-morrow.”

Pet said, “Heaven bless you, father,” murmured another “Good-night,” and disappeared within her sanctuary, closing the door after her.

“Now, Mr. Wilkeson,” said the inventor, “we can finish our conversation.”

His voice sounded like a voice from the tomb.

CHAPTER III.

THE CLASHING ORBS.

The rain had ceased, and the moon was out.  The dark, massy clouds that floated between her and the earth were doing their ghostly, phantasmagoric work.  At one moment, clear, white light, like a shroud; at another moment, darkness, like a pall.  An owl, lighting on the spire of Grace Church in his flight over the city, might have seen the white edge of the shroud, or the black edge of the pall, advancing in well-defined lines over the housetops, and the parks, and the two rivers, swiftly succeeding each other.

It was as if the mighty invisible demons of the night were capriciously trying the effects of cerements on the sleeping city.  It was as if they were perplexed between the soft beauty of the shroud and the sombre majesty of the pall.  A woman could not have tried on two shawls more often and more indecisively, before making up her mind to buy.

Little Pet’s sleeping room, like every room that faced the south, that night, was full of strange, spectral effects.  The scrolls and the roses on the cheap yellow curtains that hung in the windows, were changed to hideous faces of variable size and ugliness.  Their grotesque shadows on the floor mingled with other faces—­horrible as antique masks—­wrought by the magic of the moon from the gigantic flowers that adorned the narrow strip of carpet by the bedside.  Her dresses, suspended from a row of hooks in the corner—­and showing, in gentle swells and curves, the lithe, graceful form of the little wearer, like moulds,—­would have looked to any open eye, that dreadful night, like women hanging against the wall.  This startling idea would have been helped along by two or three shadowy bonnets depending from pegs above them.  The white somethings carelessly tossed over a chair near the head of the bed, were no longer the garments of youth, beauty, and innocence, but graveclothes, cold, shining, shuddering, in that deathly light.  The touch of the moon, like the presence of a sexton, suggested mortality.