I told you that I was charmed with her in most particulars.

 There were some that did not please me so well.

 She was above the middle height of women. I shall begin by describing her. She was slender, and
 wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languid—very languid— indeed, there was
 nothing in her appearance to indicate an invalid. Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features
 were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful,
 I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have
 often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and
 soft, and in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. I loved to let it down, tumbling
 with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her chair talking in her sweet low voice, I
 used to fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it. Heavens! If I had but known all!

 I said there were particulars which did not please me. I have told you that her confidence won me
 the first night I saw her; but I found that she exercised with respect to herself, her mother, her
 history, everything in fact connected with her life, plans, and people, an ever wakeful reserve. I
 dare say I was unreasonable, perhaps I was wrong; I dare say I ought to have respected the
 solemn injunction laid upon my father by the stately lady in black velvet. But curiosity is a restless
 and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled
 by another. What harm could it do anyone to tell me what I so ardently desired to know? Had she
 no trust in my good sense or honour? Why would she not believe me when I assured her, so
 solemnly, that I would not divulge one syllable of what she told me to any mortal breathing.

 There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent
 refusal to afford me the least ray of light.

 I cannot say we quarrelled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon any. It was, of course,
 very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I really could not help it; and I might just as well
 have let it alone.

 What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation—to nothing.

 It was all summed up in three very vague disclosures:

 First—Her name was Carmilla.

 Second—Her family was very ancient and noble.

 Third—Her home lay in the direction of the west.

 She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their
 estate, nor even that of the country they lived in.

 You are not to suppose that I worried her incessantly on these subjects. I watched opportunity,
 and rather insinuated than urged my inquiries. Once or twice, indeed, I did attack her more
 directly. But no matter what my tactics, utter failure was invariably the result. Reproaches and
 caresses were all lost upon her. But I must add this, that her evasion was conducted with so pretty
 a melancholy and deprecation, with so many, and even passionate declarations of her liking for
 me, and trust in my honour, and with so many promises that I should at last know all, that I could
 not find it in my heart long to be offended with her.

 She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine,
 murmur with her lips near my ear, "Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel
 because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded,
 my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life,
 and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in
 your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a
 while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit."

 And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling
 embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

 Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me.

 From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to
 wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a
 lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover
 myself when she withdrew her arms.

 In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that
 was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct
 thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration,
 and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the
 feeling.

 I now write, after an interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and
 horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations, in the ordeal through which I was
 unconsciously passing; though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main current of my
 story. But, I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in which our passions
 have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly
 remembered.

 Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and
 hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with
 languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous
 respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet
 over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my
 cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, you
 and I are one for ever." Then she has thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over
 her eyes, leaving me trembling.

 "Are we related," I used to ask; "what can you mean by all this? I remind you perhaps of some
 one whom you love; but you must not, I hate it; I don't know you—I don't know myself when
 you look so and talk so."

 She used to sigh at my vehemence, then turn away and drop my hand.

 Respecting these very extraordinary manifestations I strove in vain to form any satisfactory
 theory—I could not refer them to affectation or trick. It was unmistakably the momentary breaking
 out of suppressed instinct and emotion. Was she, notwithstanding her mother's volunteered denial,
 subject to brief visitations of insanity; or was there here a disguise and a romance? I had read in
 old story books of such things. What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and
 sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress. But
 there were many things against this hypothesis, highly interesting as it was to my vanity.

 I could boast of no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights to offer. Between these
 passionate moments there were long intervals of common-place, of gaiety, of brooding
 melancholy, during which, except that I detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me,
 at times I might have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement
 her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible with a
 masculine system in a state of health.

 In some respects her habits were odd. Perhaps not so singular in the opinion of a town lady like
 you, as they appeared to us rustic people. She used to come down very late, generally not till one
 o'clock, she would then take a cup of chocolate, but eat nothing; we then went out for a walk,
 which was a mere saunter, and she seemed, almost immediately, exhausted, and either returned to
 the schloss or sat on one of the benches that were placed, here and there, among the trees. This
 was a bodily languor in which her mind did not sympathise. She was always an animated talker,
 and very intelligent.

 She sometimes alluded for a moment to her own home, or mentioned an adventure or situation, or
 an early recollection, which indicated a people of strange manners, and described customs of
 which we knew nothing. I gathered from these chance hints that her native country was much more
 remote than I had at first fancied.

 As we sat thus one afternoon under the trees a funeral passed us by. It was that of a pretty young
 girl, whom I had often seen, the daughter of one of the rangers of the forest. The poor man was
 walking behind the coffin of his darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken.
 Peasants walking two-and-two came behind, they were singing a funeral hymn.

 I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were very sweetly singing.

 My companion shook me a little roughly, and I turned surprised.

 She said brusquely, "Don't you perceive how discordant that is?"

 "I think it very sweet, on the contrary," I answered, vexed at the interruption, and very
 uncomfortable, lest the people who composed the little procession should observe and resent
 what was passing.

 I resumed, therefore, instantly, and was again interrupted. "You pierce my ears," said Carmilla,
 almost angrily, and stopping her ears with her tiny fingers. "Besides, how can you tell that your
 religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why you
 must die— everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home."

 "My father has gone on with the clergyman to the churchyard. I thought you knew she was to be
 buried to-day."

 "She? I don't trouble my head about peasants. I don't know who she is," answered Carmilla, with
 a flash from her fine eyes.

 "She is the poor girl who fancied she saw a ghost a fortnight ago, and has been dying ever since,
 till yesterday, when she expired."

 "Tell me nothing about ghosts. I shan't sleep to-night if you do."

 "I hope there is no plague or fever coming; all this looks very like it," I continued. "The
 swineherd's young wife died only a week ago, and she thought something seized her by the throat
 as she lay in her bed, and nearly strangled her. Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany
 some forms of fever. She was quite well the day before. She sank afterwards, and died before a
 week."

 "Well, her funeral is over, I hope, and her hymn sung; and our ears shan't be tortured with that
 discord and jargon. It has made me nervous. Sit down here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand;
 press it hard-hard-harder."

 We had moved a little back, and had come to another seat.

 She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It
 darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and
 compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over
 with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a
 fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering
 broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided. "There! That comes of strangling people with
 hymns!" she said at last. "Hold me, hold me still. It is passing away."

 And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the sombre impression which the spectacle had
 left upon me, she became unusually animated and chatty; and so we got home.

 This was the first time I had seen her exhibit any definable symptoms of that delicacy of health
 which her mother had spoken of. It was the first time, also, I had seen her exhibit anything like
 temper.

 Both passed away like a summer cloud; and never but once afterwards did I witness on her part a
 momentary sign of anger. I will tell you how it happened.

 She and I were looking out of one of the long drawing-room windows, when there entered the
 courtyard, over the drawbridge, a figure of a wanderer whom I knew very well. He used to visit
 the schloss generally twice a year.

 It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity.
 He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He
 was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count,
 from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic-lantern, and two boxes, which I
 well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used
 to make my father laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots squirrels, fish, and
 hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling effect. He had a fiddle, a
 box of conjuring apparatus, a pair of foils and masks attached to his belt, several other mysterious
 cases dangling about him, and a black staff with copper ferrules in his hand. His companion was a
 rough spare dog, that followed at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously at the drawbridge, and
 in a little while began to howl dismally.

 In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the court-yard, raised his grotesque hat,
 and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his compliments very volubly in execrable French,
 and German not much better. Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air to which
 he sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity, that made me laugh, in spite
 of the dog's howling.

 Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat in his left hand, his
 fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of
 all his accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and
 the curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at our bidding, to display.

 "Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which is going like the wolf, I
 hear, through these woods," he said dropping his hat on the pavement. "They are dying of it right
 and left and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may laugh in his
 face."

 These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them.

 Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I.

 He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least, I can answer for
 myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our faces, seemed to detect something that fixed
 for a moment his curiosity,

 In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd little steel instruments.

 "See here, my lady," he said, displaying it, and addressing me, "I profess, among other things less
 useful, the art of dentistry. Plague take the dog!" he interpolated. "Silence, beast! He howls so that
 your ladyships can scarcely hear a word. Your noble friend, the young lady at your right, has the
 sharpest tooth,—long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha! With my sharp and long
 sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it
 must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her
 ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey? Is the
 young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?"

 The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the window.

 "How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall demand redress from him.
 My father would have had the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart-whip, and
 burnt to the bones with the castle brand!"

 She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly lost sight of the
 offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it had risen, and she gradually recovered her
 usual tone, and seemed to forget the little hunchback and his follies.

 My father was out of spirits that evening. On coming in he told us that there had been another case
 very similar to the two fatal ones which had lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on his
 estate, only a mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very nearly in the
 same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.

 "All this," said my father, "is strictly referable to natural causes. These poor people infect one
 another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested
 their neighbours."

 "But that very circumstance frightens one horribly," said Carmilla.

 "How so?" inquired my father.

 "I am so afraid of fancying I see such things; I think it would be as bad as reality."

 "We are in God's hands: nothing can happen without his permission, and all will end well for those
 who love him. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us."

 "Creator! Nature!" said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. "And this disease that
 invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature—don't they? All things in
 the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so."

 "The doctor said he would come here to-day," said my father, after a silence. "I want to know
 what he thinks about it, and what he thinks we had better do."

 "Doctors never did me any good," said Carmilla.

 "Then you have been ill?" I asked.

 "More ill than ever you were," she answered.

 "Long ago?"

 "Yes, a long time. I suffered from this very illness; but I forget all but my pain and weakness, and
 they were not so bad as are suffered in other diseases."

 "You were very young then?"

 "I dare say; let us talk no more of it. You would not wound a friend?"

 She looked languidly in my eyes, and passed her arm round my waist lovingly, and led me out of
 the room. My father was busy over some papers near the window.

 "Why does your papa like to frighten us?" said the pretty girl with a sigh and a little shudder.

 "He doesn't, dear Carmilla, it is the very furthest thing from his mind."

 "Are you afraid, dearest?"

 "I should be very much if I fancied there was any real danger of my being attacked as those poor
 people were."

 "You are afraid to die?"

 "Yes, every one is."

 "But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars
 while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime
 there are grubs and larvae, don't you see— each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and
 structure. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room."

 Later in the day the doctor came, and was closeted with papa for some time. He was a skilful
 man, of sixty and upwards, he wore powder, and shaved his pale face as smooth as a pumpkin.
 He and papa emerged from the room together, and I heard papa laugh, and say as they came out:

 "Well, I do wonder at a wise man like you. What do you say to hippogriffs and dragons?"

 The doctor was smiling, and made answer, shaking his head—

 "Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either."

 And so the walked on, and I heard no more. I did not then know what the doctor had been
 broaching, but I think I guess it now.
 

                                                                Next