The Haunted Chamber

At last, however, his heart compelling him, he speaks aloud.

"Florence, you still awake, when all the world is sleeping?"

Her name falling from his lips touches a chord in her breast, and wakes her to passionate life.

"You too," she says in a whisper that reaches his strained ears. There seems to her a subtle joy in the thought that they two of all the household are awake, are here talking together alone in the pale light of the moon.

Yet she is wrong in imagining that no others are up in the house, as his next words tell her.

"It is not a matter of wonder in my case," he responds; "a few fellows are still in the smoking-room. It is early, you know--not yet three. But you--why are you keeping a lonely vigil like this?"

"The moon tempted me to the window," answers Florence. "See how calm she looks riding majestically up there. See"--stretching out her bare white arm until the beams fall full upon it, and seem to change it to purest marble--"does it not make one feel as if all the world were being bathed in its subdued glow?"

A pale tremulous smile widens her lips. Sir Adrian, plucking a tall pale lily growing near him, flings it upward with such an eager aim that it alights upon her window-sill. She sees it. Her fingers close upon it.

"Fit emblem of its possessor," says Adrian softly, and rather unsteadily. "Do you know of what you remind me, sitting there in your white robes? A medieval saint cut in stone--a pure angel, too good, too far above all earthly passion to enter into it, or understand it, and the grief that must ever attend upon it."

He speaks bitterly. It seems to him that she is indeed cold not to have guessed before this the intensity of his love for her. However much she may have given her affection to another, it still seems to him inexpressibly hard that she can have no pity for his suffering. He gazes at her intently. Do the mystic moonbeams deceive him, or are there tears in her great dark eyes? His heart beats quickly. Once again he remembers her emotion of the past evening. He hears again her passionate sobs. Is she unhappy? Are there thorns in her path that are difficult to remove?

"Florence, once again I entreat you to confide in me," he says, after a pause.

"I can not," she returns, sadly but firmly. "But there is one thing I must say to you--think of me as you may for saying it--I am not cold as you seemed to imply a moment since; I am not made of stone; and, alas, the grief you think me incapable of understanding is mine already! You have wronged me in your thoughts. I have here," she exclaims with some vehemence, laying the hand in which she still holds the drooping lily upon her breast, "what I would gladly be without--a heart."