Old Dietrich, however, threw away a spoonful of medicine every quarter of an hour, and when night came the bottle was empty.

And now the longed-for night had closed in with its curtain of darkness, its noiselessness and quiet.  Deep silence ruled throughout the castle, no loud word was any longer to be heard, not a man was to be met in hall or passage.  Before the ushering in of the momentous hour each one had made haste to tuck himself up in bed, and shut his eyes, for everybody dreaded lest the specter of the preceding night should walk abroad again and show itself to him.  The sentinels in the corridor before the Electoral suite of rooms and in the vestibule of the Prince’s apartments dared not walk to and fro, for the noise of their own steps terrified them, and the dark shadows of their own forms, thrown upon the ground by the dim oil lamps, filled them with unspeakable dread.  They had planted themselves stiffly and rigidly beside the doors, firmly determined as soon as the awful apparition should show itself to take to their heels and return to the guardroom.  And happily they had some justification for this, inasmuch as the soldiers had received orders from the Stadtholder in the Mark, when they relieved guard, to convey instant tidings to the guardhouse if anything remarkable should occur.

In order to convey instant tidings, they must of course take to their heels and forsake their posts.  This was the only comfort of the soldier who was stationed in the vestibule leading to the princely apartments, and therefore he stood close to the door, which was only upon the latch, that he might the more rapidly gain the grand corridor, and warn in his flight the sentinels there.  Yet he dared not open his eyes, and his heart beat so violently that it took away his breath.

The great cathedral clock tolled the hour of midnight with loud and heavy strokes.  The clock in the castle tower gave answer, and then the wall clock in the great corridor slowly and solemnly struck twelve.

The soldier closed his eyes, and murmured with trembling lips, “All good spirits praise the Lord our God.”

The clangor of the clocks had ceased, and all again was still.

The soldier ventured to open his eyes again.  As yet no sound broke in upon the stillness; his glance timidly and slowly made the circuit of the hall.  The two oil lamps burned clearly enough to enable him to survey the whole intervening space.  He saw everything quite distinctly.  There the door with the lamps, here the door beside which he leaned; against the wall on that side those two huge, black wooden presses, so curiously carved, and between them that little door.  This door began to make him uneasy.  Whither did it lead?  Why stood no guard there?  Was it locked or merely latched?  He asked himself all this with quickly beating heart, and could not turn his glance from it.  He had never before observed it.  Now it seemed to him as if it moved!  A cold shudder ran through his whole frame.