“Percy! come here!”

Her voice is eager and agitated.  She has opened a last door at the end of the yard, and has started back from some sight which has suddenly met her view.  I hitch the horses’ bridles on a rusty nail in the wall near me, and join my wife.  She has turned pale, and catches me nervously by the arm.

“Good heavens!” she cries; “look at that!”

I look—­and what do I see?  I see a dingy little stable, containing two stalls.  In one stall a horse is munching his corn.  In the other a man is lying asleep on the litter.

A worn, withered, woebegone man in a hostler’s dress.  His hollow wrinkled cheeks, his scanty grizzled hair, his dry yellow skin, tell their own tale of past sorrow or suffering.  There is an ominous frown on his eyebrows—­there is a painful nervous contraction on the side of his mouth.  I hear him breathing convulsively when I first look in; he shudders and sighs in his sleep.  It is not a pleasant sight to see, and I turn round instinctively to the bright sunlight in the yard.  My wife turns me back again in the direction of the stable door.

“Wait!” she says.  “Wait! he may do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“He was talking in his sleep, Percy, when I first looked in.  He was dreaming some dreadful dream.  Hush! he’s beginning again.”

I look and listen.  The man stirs on his miserable bed.  The man speaks in a quick, fierce whisper through his clinched teeth.  “Wake up!  Wake up, there!  Murder!”

There is an interval of silence.  He moves one lean arm slowly until it rests over his throat; he shudders, and turns on his straw; he raises his arm from his throat, and feebly stretches it out; his hand clutches at the straw on the side toward which he has turned; he seems to fancy that he is grasping at the edge of something.  I see his lips begin to move again; I step softly into the stable; my wife follows me, with her hand fast clasped in mine.  We both bend over him.  He is talking once more in his sleep—­strange talk, mad talk, this time.

“Light gray eyes” (we hear him say), “and a droop in the left eyelid—­flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it—­all right, mother! fair, white arms with a down on them—­little, lady’s hand, with a reddish look round the fingernails—­the knife—­the cursed knife—­first on one side, then on the other—­aha, you she-devil! where is the knife?”

He stops and grows restless on a sudden.  We see him writhing on the straw.  He throws up both his hands and gasps hysterically for breath.  His eyes open suddenly.  For a moment they look at nothing, with a vacant glitter in them—­then they close again in deeper sleep.  Is he dreaming still?  Yes; but the dream seems to have taken a new course.  When he speaks next, the tone is altered; the words are few—­sadly and imploringly repeated over and over again.  “Say you love me!  I am so fond of you.  Say you love me! say you love me!” He sinks into deeper and deeper sleep, faintly repeating those words.  They die away on his lips.  He speaks no more.