Failing asleep as readily as usual, her repose was disturbed by a succession of frightful dreams; the central figure in every one of them being the figure of her dead brother, the first Lord Montbarry.  She saw him starving in a loathsome prison; she saw him pursued by assassins, and dying under their knives; she saw him drowning in immeasurable depths of dark water; she saw him in a bed on fire, burning to death in the flames; she saw him tempted by a shadowy creature to drink, and dying of the poisonous draught.  The reiterated horror of these dreams had such an effect on her that she rose with the dawn of day, afraid to trust herself again in bed.  In the old times, she had been noted in the family as the one member of it who lived on affectionate terms with Montbarry.  His other sister and his brothers were constantly quarrelling with him.  Even his mother owned that her eldest son was of all her children the child whom she least liked.  Sensible and resolute woman as she was, Mrs. Norbury shuddered with terror as she sat at the window of her room, watching the sunrise, and thinking of her dreams.

She made the first excuse that occurred to her, when her maid came in at the usual hour, and noticed how ill she looked.  The woman was of so superstitious a temperament that it would have been in the last degree indiscreet to trust her with the truth.  Mrs. Norbury merely remarked that she had not found the bed quite to her liking, on account of the large size of it.  She was accustomed at home, as her maid knew, to sleep in a small bed.  Informed of this objection later in the day, the manager regretted that he could only offer to the lady the choice of one other bedchamber, numbered Thirty-eight, and situated immediately over the bedchamber which she desired to leave.  Mrs. Norbury accepted the proposed change of quarters.  She was now about to pass her second night in the room occupied in the old days of the palace by Baron Rivar.

Once more, she fell asleep as usual.  And, once more, the frightful dreams of the first night terrified her, following each other in the same succession.  This time her nerves, already shaken, were not equal to the renewed torture of terror inflicted on them.  She threw on her dressing-gown, and rushed out of her room in the middle of the night.  The porter, alarmed by the banging of the door, met her hurrying headlong down the stairs, in search of the first human being she could find to keep her company.  Considerably surprised at this last new manifestation of the famous ‘English eccentricity,’ the man looked at the hotel register, and led the lady upstairs again to the room occupied by her maid.  The maid was not asleep, and, more wonderful still, was not even undressed.  She received her mistress quietly.  When they were alone, and when Mrs. Norbury had, as a matter of necessity, taken her attendant into her confidence, the woman made a very strange reply.