A moment more! and I was alone with those two.  Not a wreck of the phantom-multitude remained; the towering city, the gleaming corridors, the fire-bright radiance had vanished.  We stood on a wilderness—­a still, black lake of dead waters was before us; a white, faint, misty light shone on us.  Outspread over the noisome ground lay the ruins of a house, rooted up and overthrown to its foundations.  The demon figures, still watching on either side of me, drew me slowly forward to the fallen stones, and pointed to two dead bodies lying among them.

My father!—­my sister!—­both cold and still, and whiter than the white light that showed them to me.  The demons at my side stretched out their crooked talons, and forbade me to kneel before my father, or to kiss Clara’s wan face, before I went to torment.  They struck me motionless where I stood—­and unveiled their hideous faces once more, jeering at me in triumph.  Anon, the lake of black waters heaved up and overflowed, and noiselessly sucked us away into its central depths—­depths that were endless; depths of rayless darkness, in which we slowly eddied round and round, deeper and deeper down at every turn.  I felt the bodies of my father and my sister touching me in cold contact:  I stretched out my arms to clasp them and sink with them; and the demon pair glided between us, and separated me from them.  This vain striving to join myself to my dead kindred when we touched each other in the slow, endless whirlpool, ever continued and was ever frustrated in the same way.  Still we sank apart, down the black gulphs of the lake; still there was no light, no sound, no change, no pause of repose—­and this was eternity:  the eternity of Hell!

* * * * *

Such was one dream-vision out of many that I saw.  It must have been at this time that men were set to watch me day and night (as I afterwards heard), in order that I might be held down in my bed, when a paroxysm of convulsive strength made me dangerous to myself and to all about me.  The period too when the doctors announced that the fever had seized on my brain, and was getting the better of their skill, must have been this period.

But though they gave up my life as lost, I was not to die.  There came a time, at last, when the gnawing fever lost its hold; and I awoke faintly one morning to a new existence—­to a life frail and helpless as the life of a new-born babe.

I was too weak to move, to speak, to open my eyes, to exert in the smallest degree any one faculty, bodily or mental, that I possessed.  The first sense of which I regained the use, was the sense of hearing; and the first sound that I recognised, was of a light footstep which mysteriously approached, paused, and then retired again gently outside my door.  The hearing of this sound was my first pleasure, the waiting for its repetition my first source of happy expectation, since I had been ill.  Once more the footsteps approached—­paused a moment—­then