She buried her face in her hands, and endeavored to shut out the grotesque and phantom-like forms that seemed to dance before her.  A deathlike stillness reigned through the house, the silence alone broken by the ticking of the great dial at the head of the staircase.  There is something inexpressibly awful in the ticking of a clock, when heard at midnight by the lonely and anxious watcher beside the bed of death.  It is the voice of time marking its slow but certain progress towards eternity, and warning us in solemn tones that it will soon cease to number the hours for the sufferer for ever.  Elinor trembled as she listened to the low monotonous measured sounds; and she felt at that moment a presentiment that her own weary pilgrimage on earth was drawing to a close.

“Oh, Algernon!” she thought; “it may be a crime, but I sometimes think that if I could see you once more—­only once more—­I could forget all my wrongs and sufferings, and die in peace.”

The unuttered thought was scarcely formed, when a slight rustling noise shook the curtains of the bed, and the next moment a tall figure in white glided across the room.  It drew nearer, and Elinor, in spite of the wish she had just dared to whisper to herself, struggled with the vision, as a sleeper does with the night-mare, when the suffocating grasp of the fiend is upon his throat.  Her presence of mind forsook her, and, with a shriek of uncontrollable terror, she flung herself across the bed, and endeavored to awaken her husband.  The place he had occupied a few minutes before was vacant; and, raising her fear-stricken head, she perceived, with feelings scarcely less allied to fear, that the figure she had mistaken for the ghost of Algernon was the corporeal form of the miser.

He was asleep, but his mind appeared to be actively employed.  He drew near the table with a cautious step, and took from beneath a broad leathern belt, which he always wore next his skin, a small key.  Elinor sat up on the bed, and watched his movements with intense interest.  He next took up the candle, and glided out of the room.  Slipping off her shoes she followed him with noiseless steps.  He descended the great staircase, and suddenly stopped in the centre of the entrance hall.  Here he put down the light on the last step of the broad oak stairs, and proceeded to remove one of the stone flags that formed the pavement of the hall.  With some difficulty he accomplished his task; then kneeling down, and holding the light over the chasm, he said in hollow and unearthly tones that echoed mournfully through the empty building: 

“Look! here is money; my father’s savings and my own.  Will this save my soul?”

Elinor leaned over the sordid wretch, and discovered with no small astonishment that the aperture contained a great quantity of gold and silver coins; and the most valuable articles of the family plate and jewels.

“Unhappy man!” she mentally cried; “dost thou imagine that these glittering heaps of metal will purchase the redemption of a soul like thine, or avert the certainty of future punishment?—­for never was the parable of the servant who buried his talent in the dust more fully exemplified than in thee.”