Carmilla

I remembered so well the thoughtful sweet face of that white-haired old

man, in his black cassock, as he stood in that rude, lofty, brown room,

with the clumsy furniture of a fashion three hundred years old about

him, and the scanty light entering its shadowy atmosphere through the

small lattice. He kneeled, and the three women with him, and he prayed

aloud with an earnest quavering voice for, what appeared to me, a long

time. I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some time after

it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out

vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded

by darkness.