It was wonderful to himself afterwards, that he should have observed all these particulars; but the fact was, that they rather burnt themselves in upon his brain, than were taken notice of by him.  They returned upon him afterwards by degrees, as one becomes sensible of the pain of a wound.

But there was one sign of life.  Though the eyes were closed, tears flowed from them; and seemed to have worn channels for their constant flow down this face of death, which ought to have been lying still in the grave, returning to its dust, and was weeping above ground instead.  The figure stood for a moment, as one who would gaze, could she but open her heavy, death-rusted eyelids.  Then, as if in hopeless defeat, she turned away.  And then, to crown the horror literally as well as figuratively, Hugh saw that her hair sparkled and gleamed goldenly, as the hair of a saint might, if the aureole were combed down into it.  She moved towards the door with a fettered pace, such as one might attribute to the dead if they walked; —­ to the dead body, I say, not to the living ghost; to that which has lain in the prison-hold, till the joints are decayed with the grave-damps, and the muscles are stiff with more than deathly cold.  She dragged one limb after the other slowly and, to appearance, painfully, as she moved towards the door which Hugh had locked.

When she had gone half-way to the door, Hugh, lying as he was on a couch, could see her feet, for her dress did not reach the ground.  They were bare, as the feet of the dead ought to be, which are about to tread softly in the realm of Hades, But how stained and mouldy and iron-spotted, as if the rain had been soaking through the spongy coffin, did the dress show beside the pure whiteness of those exquisite feet!  Not a sign of the tomb was upon them.  Small, living, delicately formed, Hugh, could he have forgot the face they bore above, might have envied the floor which in their nakedness they seemed to caress, so lingeringly did they move from it in their noiseless progress.

She reached the door, put out her hand, and touched it.  Hugh saw it open outwards and let her through.  Nor did this strike him as in the smallest degree marvellous.  It closed again behind her, noiseless as her footfalls.

The moment she vanished, the power of motion returned to him, and Hugh sprang to his feet.  He leaped to the door.  With trembling hand he inserted the key, and the lock creaked as he turned it.

In proof of his being in tolerable possession of his faculties at the moment, and that what he was relating to me actually occurred, he told me that he remembered at once that he had heard that peculiar creak, a few moments before Euphra and he discovered that they were left alone in this very chamber.  He had never thought of it before.

Still the door would not open:  it was bolted as well, and the bolt was very stiff to withdraw.  But at length he succeeded.