toward the bed. Those eyes, so dark, so wonderfully intelligent, met me with such a strange expression that I involuntarily rose from my seat and moved toward the deep window, to relieve myself of a growing sentiment of almost superstitious anxiety.
"Will you be so kind as to ring the bell for me?" I rang it, and soon after her maid entered the room: a prim, gaunt-looking woman, with long black hair, pressed upward from her temples, and crowded under a very white and close-fitting cap.
This maid, though almost speechless from respect, in that old dwelling, and in that solemn servitude, though apparently gentle and devoted to the singular mistress it had been her duty to serve for years, was an object always of peculiar aversion to me. Her quiet footfall, cat-like, through the long corridors, that I heard at night when all the rest of the domestics were a-bed, often sent a small shiver through my nervous system, and made me wish that she and the rest of the ghosts would go to sleep.
Upon the entrance of this servant the lady rose, supporting herself by both her arms, extended backward in her bed. Her long white hair fell from her sculptured head upon her shoulders, and as she lifted her hand, those old keys rattling, she said:
"Lift the carpet from the hearth-stone, and hold a light for Mr. ———." I was standing by the window, and the red light from distant iron furnaces gleamed over the gloomy landscape, and sent an unnatural color into the room, deepening the gloom, and bringing forward the rolls of the old damask curtains, that hung, as they had hung for years, in almost funereal majesty, around the bed of the invalid. The maid, after some moments of silent work, drew back the carpet, and then, lighting a candle, beckoned me to approach. The mistress placed herself in such a position that she could see me and also the hearth. I came near, without uttering a syllable of inquiry, to the spot that had been uncovered, and stood, with no little anxiety, waiting farther direction.
"Stoop down and see if you can not find, upon that part of the old hearth-stone nearest to the fire-place, the mark of a black ring." I examined the stone, and there was, in truth, the mark of a ring upon it. The ring was about as large as the bottom of an ordinary
