About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was slow.  The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of motions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concluded had no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself.  She became at length convalescent—­finally, well.  Yet but a second more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering; and from this attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether recovered.  Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming character, and of more alarming recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians.  With the increase of the chronic disease, which had thus, apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by human means, I could not fail to observe a similar increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her excitability by trivial causes of fear.  She spoke again, and now more frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds—­of the slight sounds—­and of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly alluded.

One night, near the closing in of September, she pressed this distressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention.  She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching, with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of her emaciated countenance.  I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the ottomans of India.  She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear—­of motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive.  The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind.  But a deadly pallor, overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless.  She appeared to be fainting, and no attendants were within call.  I remembered where was deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it.  But, as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention.  I had felt that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich luster thrown from the censer, a shadow—­a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect—­such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade.  But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of