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Their grotesque shadows on
the floor mingled with other faces--horrible as antique masks--wrought
by the magic of the moon from the gigantic flowers that adorned the
narrow strip of carpet by the bedside. Her dresses, suspended from a row
of hooks in the corner--and showing, in gentle swells and curves, the
lithe, graceful form of the little wearer, like moulds,--would have
looked to any open eye, that dreadful night, like women hanging against
the wall. This startling idea would have been helped along by two or
three shadowy bonnets depending from pegs above them. The white
somethings carelessly tossed over a chair near the head of the bed, were
no longer the garments of youth, beauty, and innocence, but
graveclothes, cold, shining, shuddering, in that deathly light. The
touch of the moon, like the presence of a sexton, suggested mortality.
The narrow, single bed, with its four black posts, looked like the fatal
trestle, or bier. The slender body which lay upon it was still as death.
The head nestled motionless in a deep indentation of the pillow.


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