The tears streamed suddenly upon his face; his soul lightened and turned dark within him; and, as one faints away, so consciousness swooned, and he fell suddenly down a precipice of sleep.  The music rose again, a pensive and holy chant, and sounded on to its close, unaffected by the action of his brain, for he slept and heard it no more.  He lay tranquilly, hardly seeming to breathe, in motionless repose.  The room was dim and silent, and the furniture took uncouth shapes around him.  The red glow upon the ceiling, from the screened fire, showed the misty figure of the phantom kneeling by his side.  All light had gone from the spectral form.  It knelt beside him, mutely, as in prayer.  Once it gazed at his quiet face with a mournful tenderness, and its shadowy hands caressed his forehead.  Then it resumed its former attitude, and the slow hours crept by.

At last it rose and glided to the table, on which lay the open letter.  It seemed to try to lift the sheets with its misty hands, but vainly.  Next it essayed the lifting of a pen which lay there, but failed.  It was a piteous sight, to see its idle efforts on these shapes of grosser matter, which appeared now to have to it but the existence of illusions.  Wandering about the shadowy room, it wrung its phantom hands as in despair.

Presently it grew still.  Then it passed quickly to his side, and stood before him.  He slept calmly.  It placed one ghostly hand above his forehead, and with the other pointed to the open letter.  In this attitude its shape grew momentarily more distinct.  It began to kindle into brightness.  The pale flame again flowed from its hand, streaming downward to his brain.  A look of trouble darkened the sleeping face.  Stronger,—­stronger; brighter,—­brighter; until, at last, it stood before him, a glorious shape of light, with, an awful look of commanding love in its shining features:  and the sleeper sprang to his feet with a cry!

The phantom had vanished.  He saw nothing.  His first impression was, not that he had dreamed, but that, awaking in the familiar room, he had seen the spirit of his dead friend, bright and awful by his side, and that it had gone!  In the flash of that quick change, from sleeping to waking, he had detected, he thought, the unearthly being that, he now felt, watched him from behind the air, and it had vanished!  The library was the same as in the moment of that supernatural revealing; the open letter lay upon the table still; only that was gone which had made these common aspects terrible.  Then all the hard, strong scepticism of his nature, which had been driven backward by the shock of his first conviction, recoiled, and rushed within him, violently struggling for its former vantage-ground; till, at length, it achieved the foothold for a doubt.  Could he have dreamed?  The ghost, invisible, still watched him.  Yes, a dream,—­only a dream; but, how vivid, how strange!  With a slow thrill creeping through his veins, the blood curdling at his heart, a cold sweat starting on his forehead, he stared through the dimness of the room.  All was vacancy.