He sat up, and looked out into the room.

Something seemed upon him--he could not tell what.
He felt as if something had been going on besides the striking of the clock, and were not yet over--as if something was even now being done in the room.

But there the old woman slept, motionless, and apparently in perfect calm! It could not, however, have been perfect as it seemed, for presently she began to talk.

At first came only broken sentences, occasionally with a long pause; and just as he had concluded she would say nothing more, she would begin again.

There was something awful to the fancy of the youth in the issuing of words from the lips of one apparently unconscious of surrounding things; her voice was like the voice of one speaking from another world.