“The fall may have injured him,” she suggested.

“The blow on his temple has done the fearful work,” said I.

There was a perceptible start, and another look of fear-almost terror.

“For heaven’s sake, doctor,” she said, rousing herself, and speaking half imperatively, “do something!  Don’t stand speculating about the cause; but do something if you have any skill.”

Thus prompted, I set myself to work, in good earnest, with my patient.  The result was in no way flattering to my skill, for he passed to his account in less than an hour, dying without a sign.

I shall never forget the wild screams which rang awfully through the old mansion, when it was announced to Mrs. Allen that the Captain was dead.  She flung herself upon his body, tore her hair, and committed other extravagances.  All the slumbering passions of her undisciplined nature seemed quickened into sudden life, overmastering her in their strong excitement.  So it would have seemed to a less suspicious observer; but I thought that I could detect the overacting of pretence.  I may have done her wrong; but the impression still remains.  At the funeral, this extravagant role of grief was re-enacted, and the impression was left on many minds that she was half mad with grief.

Occasionally, after this event, I was summoned to the Allen House to see its unhappy mistress.  I say unhappy, for no human being ever had a face written all over with the characters you might read in hers, that was not miserable.  I used to study it, sometimes, to see if I could get anything like a true revelation of her inner life.  The sudden lighting up of her countenance at times, as you observed its rapidly varying expression, made you almost shudder, for the gleam which shot across it looked like a reflection from hell.  I know no other word to express what I mean.  Remorse, at times, I could plainly read.

One thing I soon noticed; the room in which Captain Allen died—­the north-west chamber before mentioned—­remained shut up; and an old servant told me, years afterwards, that Mrs. Allen had never been inside of it since the fatal day on which I attended him in his last moments.

At the time when this story opens the old lady was verging on to sixty.  The five years which had passed since she was left alone had bent her form considerably, and the diseased state of mind which I noticed when first called in to visit the family as a physician, was now but a little way removed from insanity.  She was haunted by many strange hallucinations; and the old servant above alluded to, informed me, that she was required to sleep in the room with her mistress, as she never would be alone after dark.  Often, through the night, she would start up in terror, her diseased imagination building up terrible phantoms in the land of dreams, alarming the house with her cries.

I rarely visited her that I did not see new evidences of waning reason.  In the beginning I was fearful that she might do some violence to herself or her servants, but her insanity began to assume a less excitable form; and at last she sank into a condition of torpor, both of mind and body, from which I saw little prospect of her ever rising.