Sadly and wearily enough Lady Vera goes to her room and her couch that night. Having disrobed and retired, she dismisses her maid to the dressing-room to complete the packing for to-morrow's flitting. Then, closing her heavy eyelids, she endeavors to woo sleep to her weary pillow.

Strange, shuddering sighs heave the fair breast as she lies there in the dim, half-light of the lowered lamp, with her fair arms tossed above her golden head, and the dark lashes drooping against the pale and lovely cheeks.

Sir Harry Clive's conversation has revived in her sensitive, imaginative mind all her horror of that strange, living entombment through which she has passed years ago, all unknown to herself by reason of her father's tender, shielding love.

"I have lain in the bosom of the dark earth, the coffin-lid has been fastened down upon my living breast, the cold, black clods have been heaped upon me; I have been buried alive. Oh, horrible!" she murmurs, aloud, and to her excited fancy it seems as if the echo of a low, diabolical laugh floats through the room.

She starts up on her elbow with a low and frightened cry.

"Elsie, did you speak? did you laugh?" she calls out to her maid in the dressing-room; but Elsie, absorbed in the prosaic business of packing, does not hear her voice, and in a moment the countess falls back upon her pillow, chiding herself for nervousness.

"It was a foolish fancy, merely," she tells herself. "I must not let my nervous thoughts run on like this through my terror of that mysterious burial. I will compose myself to sleep. The hour is getting late. Perhaps Elsie has finished her work and gone."

Once more she vainly tries to lose herself in sleep, but her heart beats in her ears, her temples throb, some strange, alien, agitating influence controls her mind, banishing rest and repose.

She puts her hands over her ears, in mortal dread of hearing that low, eerie, unearthly cackle of malicious mirth again, and shuts her eyes as if in dread of seeing some strange, unwelcome vision start out from the shadowy hangings of the darkened room.

"Surely I am going mad under the weight of my troubles," she says to herself, half-fearfully. "This sleeplessness, these weird, unearthly fancies must be the premonitions of reason tottering on its throne."

The minutes pass. Gradually Lady Vera becomes conscious of a delicate, subtle odor floating lightly through the room. She does not recognize it as a perfume. It is simply an odor, faintly sickening, yet strangely soothing to her excited senses. Her eyelids fall more heavily. She seems to sleep.

Sleeping, a hideous vision comes to Lady Vera. A dark-robed, creeping figure seems to start from the black shadows at the furthest corner of the room and float across the floor to her bedside.

It is the form of a tall woman, with a hooded head and masked face, but through the small holes of the mask two murderous black eyes glare hatred upon her, the malevolent eyes of Marcia Cleveland.

Vera tries to start, to cry out, but she is motionless, dumb, bound hand and foot by the spell of that subtle, sickening drug diffused through the room, and which grows stronger as Marcia Cleveland's snowy handkerchief flutters lightly in her hand.

All this Lady Vera notes in her strange dream, with feelings of unutterable horror and despair. She tries to awake, to open her dazed eyes fully, to utter some sound from her poor, parched lips, but they refuse to obey her will.

And still those murderous black eyes glare with devilish hatred upon her through the narrow slits in the mask.

Surely that evil glare is baleful enough to kill her of itself, Vera thinks despairingly, but even at that instant the woman's hand is drawn backward and upward, and in her murderous grasp glitters the flashing blade of a dagger poised above the bare, uncovered breast of the helpless victim, and this time with a last, vain, frenzied effort to call on God for protection, Vera loses sight and consciousness, and lies helpless at the mercy of her deadly foe.

The flashing steel glitters sharply in the air, nearer and nearer it descends over the victim, in another moment it will be sheathed in her heart, when a sudden cry rings through the room, swift footsteps cross the floor, strong arms seize the body of the murderess from behind and wrench her away from her helpless prey.

The gleaming dagger falls clanking to the floor. A man's voice, passionate, vibrant, intense, cleaves the shuddering air of the night.

"Devil! murderess! If you had slain my darling, that blade should have been sheathed in your own heart a moment later!"

It is the voice of Colonel Lockhart. Elsie, the maid, comes close behind him, and together they bind the would-be murderess with strong cords that prevent her attempted escape.