It was about two o'clock in the morning,--bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.

It was the heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.

Presently a window was softly closed.

I had just begun to get over the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.

It was not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.