What might not be lurking in that ruin,
ready to wake at the lightest rustle, and, at sight of a fleeing
girl, start out in pursuit, and catch her by the hair that now
streamed behind her! And there was the hawthorn, so old and
grotesquely contorted, always bringing to her mind a frightful
German print at the head of a poem called "The Haunted Heath," in
one of her cousin Godfrey's books! It was like an old miser,
decrepit with age, pursued and unable to run! Miserable as was
her real condition, it was rendered yet more pitiable by these
terrors of the imagination. The distant howl of a dog which the
moon would not let sleep, the muffled low of a cow from a
shippen, and a certain strange sound, coming again and again,
which she could not account for, all turned to things unnatural,
therefore frightful. Faintly, once or twice, she tried to
persuade herself that it was only a horrible dream, from which
she would wake in safety; but it would not do; it was, alas! all
too real--hard, killing fact! Anyhow, dream or fact, there was no
turning; on to the end she must go. More frightful than all
possible dangers, most frightful thing of all, was the old house
she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room
inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon!
Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into
the shadow of the hedges.
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