Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. Near the end you do get an explanation for it bit still early on its very in your face. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. It has some cute parts to it but the dark parts are what hold the story together.
It really is a good, old-fashioned horror story. Amazon Renewed Refurbished products with a warranty. For the time, this was probably a shocker with a surprise twist. One person found this helpful.
Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.
Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. Book 5 of 4 in the Dr. Martin Hesselius Series. Le Fanu, often. The smartest character in the story is the antagonist who is not that smartwho proceeds to charm and bamboozle an array of protagonists who are all very nice, and not the least given to jpseph of others.
Basically this a story about a sheltered young lady whose father takes in a strange, beautiful young lady named Carmilla after her mother inexplicably leaves her for three months to take care of some business or another. Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants: This one was interesting because the vampire is a girl very similar to her victim, and there is the element of friendship and courtship?
Her eyes glittered like black diamonds, brilliant and hard. Upon arriving at Karnstein, the General asks a woodman where he can find the sherida of Mircalla Karnstein. Apart from carmklla dumb and rather annoying protagonist and the casual, perhaps even lazy characterization, Carmilla is a fascinating tale which should be read by el interested in the gothic horror genre and, generally, carmolla horror readers.
Apr 11, Kelly rated it liked it Recommends it for: I stared, frozen where I sat, as the shadows coalesced into the ethereal shape of a young woman. The General was supposed to bring his niece, Bertha Rheinfeldt, to visit the two, but the niece suddenly died under mysterious circumstances. Unfortunately, as the narrative progresses it seems to run out of steam, and the final encounter with Carmilla feels oddly flat and matter of fact.
Jan 24, Brian rated it really liked it. She wore a light diaphanous gown. Needs I was a willing servant to. Vampires and Lesbian literature. The girl who begins to grow wearier day by day. It all begins with a creepy carriage misadventure View all 15 comments.
The poor man was walking behind the coffin of his darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken. I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were very sweetly singing.
I resumed, therefore, instantly, and was again interrupted. What a fuss! Why you must die— everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home. I thought you knew she was to be buried today. 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. It has made me nervous. Sit down here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand; press it hard-hard-harder.
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.
That comes of strangling people with hymns! It is passing away. And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the somber 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 courtyard, 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 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.
These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them. 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,. Plague take the dog! 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.
Is the young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her? 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 cattle 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.
These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbors. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us. All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so. 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.
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. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room. 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:. What do you say to hippogriffs and dragons?
And so they 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. This evening there arrived from Gratz the grave, dark-faced son of the picture cleaner, with a horse and cart laden with two large packing cases, having many pictures in each.
It was a journey of ten leagues, and whenever a messenger arrived at the schloss from our little capital of Gratz, we used to crowd about him in the hall, to hear the news. This arrival created in our secluded quarters quite a sensation. The cases remained in the hall, and the messenger was taken charge of by the servants till he had eaten his supper.
Then with assistants, and armed with hammer, ripping chisel, and turnscrew, he met us in the hall, where we had assembled to witness the unpacking of the cases. Carmilla sat looking listlessly on, while one after the other the old pictures, nearly all portraits, which had undergone the process of renovation, were brought to light. My mother was of an old Hungarian family, and most of these pictures, which were about to be restored to their places, had come to us through her.
My father had a list in his hand, from which he read, as the artist rummaged out the corresponding numbers. They had, for the most part, the merit of being now seen by me, I may say, for the first time; for the smoke and dust of time had all but obliterated them.
I remembered it; it was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and nearly square, without a frame; but it was so blackened by age that I could not make it out. The artist now produced it, with evident pride.
It was quite beautiful; it was startling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla! Here you are, living, smiling, ready to speak, in this picture. And see, even the little mole on her throat.
The young lady did not acknowledge this pretty speech, did not seem to hear it. She was leaning back in her seat, her fine eyes under their long lashes gazing on me in contemplation, and she smiled in a kind of rapture.
It is not Marcia; it looks as if it was done in gold. The name is Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and this is a little coronet over and underneath A. Are there any Karnsteins living now? The family were ruined, I believe, in some civil wars, long ago, but the ruins of the castle are only about three miles away. In silence, slowly we walked down to the drawbridge, where the beautiful landscape opened before us. Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.
Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, and a face colorless and apathetic. Let us come in. Come; come; come in. I will. I shall be quite well in a few minutes.
I was beginning to take alarm, lest she should have been stricken with the strange epidemic that they said had invaded the country about us. We have a very skilful doctor near us, the physician who was with papa today.
I know how kind you all are; but, dear child, I am quite well again. There is nothing ever wrong with me, but a little weakness. People say I am languid; I am incapable of exertion; I can scarcely walk as far as a child of three years old: and every now and then the little strength I have falters, and I become as you have just seen me.
But after all I am very easily set up again; in a moment I am perfectly myself. See how I have recovered. So, indeed, she had; and she and I talked a great deal, and very animated she was; and the remainder of that evening passed without any recurrence of what I called her infatuations. I mean her crazy talk and looks, which embarrassed, and even frightened me. When the game was over he sat down beside Carmilla on the sofa, and asked her, a little anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her arrival.
I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage tomorrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find her, although I dare not yet tell you. I should be quite happy if I knew that you heard from her: but this evening the accounts of the progress of the mysterious disease that has invaded our neighborhood, grow even more alarming; and my beautiful guest, I do feel the responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much.
But I shall do my best; and one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving us without her distinct direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in parting from you to consent to it easily.
So he gallantly, in his old-fashioned way, kissed her hand, smiling and pleased at her little speech. I accompanied Carmilla as usual to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was preparing for bed. You do not know how dear you are to me, or you could not think any confidence too great to look for. But I am under vows, no nun half so awfully, and I dare not tell my story yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish.
How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature. Were you ever at a ball? I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.
There occurred that night what has confused the picture, and made its colours faint. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now; I feel so lazy. How can I get up just now and lock my door? She was lying with her tiny hands buried in her rich wavy hair, under her cheek, her little head upon the pillow, and her glittering eyes followed me wherever I moved, with a kind of shy smile that I could not decipher.
I often wondered whether our pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly had never seen her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until long after our family prayers were over, and at night she never left the drawing room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall. If it had not been that it had casually come out in one of our careless talks that she had been baptised, I should have doubted her being a Christian. Religion was a subject on which I had never heard her speak a word.
If I had known the world better, this particular neglect or antipathy would not have so much surprised me. The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them. These wise measures taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep.
A light was burning in my room. This was an old habit, of very early date, and which nothing could have tempted me to dispense with. Thus fortifed I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat.
It appeared to me about four or five feet long for it measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified.
Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side.
It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration.
As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out. I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside.
I was afraid to open it—I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head up in the bedclothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning. It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall the occurrence of that night. It was no such transitory terror as a dream leaves behind it. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition.
I could not bear next day to be alone for a moment. I should have told papa, but for two opposite reasons. At one time I thought he would laugh at my story, and I could not bear its being treated as a jest; and at another I thought he might fancy that I had been attacked by the mysterious complaint which had invaded our neighborhood. I had myself no misgiving of the kind, and as he had been rather an invalid for some time, I was afraid of alarming him.
I was comfortable enough with my good-natured companions, Madame Perrodon, and the vivacious Mademoiselle Lafontaine. They both perceived that I was out of spirits and nervous, and at length I told them what lay so heavy at my heart.
I had a dream of something black coming round my bed, and I awoke in a perfect horror, and I really thought, for some seconds, I saw a dark figure near the chimneypiece, but I felt under my pillow for my charm, and the moment my fingers touched it, the figure disappeared, and I felt quite certain, only that I had it by me, that something frightful would have made its appearance, and, perhaps, throttled me, as it did those poor people we heard of.
At this distance of time I cannot tell you, or even understand, how I overcame my horror so effectually as to lie alone in my room that night. I remember distinctly that I pinned the charm to my pillow. I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept even more soundly than usual all night.
But I wakened with a sense of lassitude and melancholy, which, however, did not exceed a degree that was almost luxurious. It was too far away the night before. I am quite sure it was all fancy, except the dreams. I used to think that evil spirits made dreams, but our doctor told me it is no such thing. Only a fever passing by, or some other malady, as they often do, he said, knocks at the door, and not being able to get in, passes on, with that alarm.
No, these complaints, wandering in the air, begin by trying the nerves, and so infect the brain, but before they can seize upon you, the antidote repels them. That I am sure is what the charm has done for us. It is nothing magical, it is simply natural. I should have been happier if I could have quite agreed with Carmilla, but I did my best, and the impression was a little losing its force. For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day.
I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me.
If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. I would not admit that I was ill, I would not consent to tell my papa, or to have the doctor sent for.
Carmilla became more devoted to me than ever, and her strange paroxysms of languid adoration more frequent. She used to gloat on me with increasing ardor the more my strength and spirits waned. This always shocked me like a momentary glare of insanity.
Without knowing it, I was now in a pretty advanced stage of the strangest illness under which mortal ever suffered. There was an unaccountable fascination in its earlier symptoms that more than reconciled me to the incapacitating effect of that stage of the malady. This fascination increased for a time, until it reached a certain point, when gradually a sense of the horrible mingled itself with it, deepening, as you shall hear, until it discolored and perverted the whole state of my life.
The first change I experienced was rather agreeable. It was very near the turning point from which began the descent of Avernus. Certain vague and strange sensations visited me in my sleep. The prevailing one was of that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing, when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by dreams that seemed interminable, and were so vague that I could never recollect their scenery and persons, or any one connected portion of their action.
But they left an awful impression, and a sense of exhaustion, as if I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger.
Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.
My sufferings had, during the last week, told upon my appearance. I had grown pale, my eyes were dilated and darkened underneath, and the languor which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance. My father asked me often whether I was ill; but, with an obstinacy which now seems to me unaccountable, I persisted in assuring him that I was quite well.
In a sense this was true. I had no pain, I could complain of no bodily derangement. My complaint seemed to be one of the imagination, or the nerves, and, horrible as my sufferings were, I kept them, with a morbid reserve, very nearly to myself. It could not be that terrible complaint which the peasants called the oupire, for I had now been suffering for three weeks, and they were seldom ill for much more than three days, when death put an end to their miseries.
Carmilla complained of dreams and feverish sensations, but by no means of so alarming a kind as mine. I say that mine were extremely alarming. Had I been capable of comprehending my condition, I would have invoked aid and advice on my knees. The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, and my perceptions were benumbed.
One night, instead of the voice I was accustomed to hear in the dark, I heard one, sweet and tender, and at the same time terrible, which said,. I wakened with a shriek, possessed with the one idea that Carmilla was being murdered. I remember springing from my bed, and my next recollection is that of standing on the lobby, crying for help.
Madame and Mademoiselle came scurrying out of their rooms in alarm; a lamp burned always on the lobby, and seeing me, they soon learned the cause of my terror. We all grew frightened, for the door was locked. We hurried back, in panic, to my room. There we rang the bell long and furiously. But, alas! Servants, however, soon came running up the stairs; I had got on my dressing gown and slippers meanwhile, and my companions were already similarly furnished.
They did so, and we stood, holding our lights aloft, in the doorway, and so stared into the room. We called her by name; but there was still no reply. We looked round the room. Everything was undisturbed.
It was exactly in the state in which I had left it on bidding her good night. But Carmilla was gone. At sight of the room, perfectly undisturbed except for our violent entrance, we began to cool a little, and soon recovered our senses sufficiently to dismiss the men. It had struck Mademoiselle that possibly Carmilla had been wakened by the uproar at her door, and in her first panic had jumped from her bed, and hid herself in a press, or behind a curtain, from which she could not, of course, emerge until the majordomo and his myrmidons had withdrawn.
We now recommenced our search, and began to call her name again. It was all to no purpose. Our perplexity and agitation increased. We examined the windows, but they were secured. I implored of Carmilla, if she had concealed herself, to play this cruel trick no longer—to come out and to end our anxieties.
It was all useless. I was by this time convinced that she was not in the room, nor in the dressing room, the door of which was still locked on this side. She could not have passed it. I was utterly puzzled. Had Carmilla discovered one of those secret passages which the old housekeeper said were known to exist in the schloss, although the tradition of their exact situation had been lost?
A little time would, no doubt, explain all—utterly perplexed as, for the present, we were. Daylight brought no solution of the difficulty.
The whole household, with my father at its head, was in a state of agitation next morning. Every part of the chateau was searched. The grounds were explored. No trace of the missing lady could be discovered. I, too, was almost beside myself, though my grief was quite of a different kind.
The morning was passed in alarm and excitement. I was astounded. I could not believe my eyes. She beckoned me to her with her pretty finger, in silence. Her face expressed extreme fear. I ran to her in an ecstasy of joy; I kissed and embraced her again and again. How did you come back? My sleep was uninterrupted, and, so far as I know, dreamless; but I woke just now on the sofa in the dressing room there, and I found the door between the rooms open, and the other door forced.
How could all this have happened without my being wakened? It must have been accompanied with a great deal of noise, and I am particularly easily wakened; and how could I have been carried out of my bed without my sleep having been interrupted, I whom the slightest stir startles?
By this time, Madame, Mademoiselle, my father, and a number of the servants were in the room. Carmilla was, of course, overwhelmed with inquiries, congratulations, and welcomes.
She had but one story to tell, and seemed the least able of all the party to suggest any way of accounting for what had happened. My father took a turn up and down the room, thinking. When my father had sent the servants away, Mademoiselle having gone in search of a little bottle of valerian and salvolatile, and there being no one now in the room with Carmilla, except my father, Madame, and myself, he came to her thoughtfully, took her hand very kindly, led her to the sofa, and sat down beside her.
But my story is simply one of bewilderment and darkness. I know absolutely nothing. Put any question you please, but you know, of course, the limitations mamma has placed me under. I need not approach the topics on which she desires our silence.
Now, the marvel of last night consists in your having been removed from your bed and your room, without being wakened, and this removal having occurred apparently while the windows were still secured, and the two doors locked upon the inside. I will tell you my theory and ask you a question. Have you ever been suspected of walking in your sleep? You got up in your sleep, unlocked the door, not leaving the key, as usual, in the lock, but taking it out and locking it on the outside; you again took the key out, and carried it away with you to some one of the five-and-twenty rooms on this floor, or perhaps upstairs or downstairs.
There are so many rooms and closets, so much heavy furniture, and such accumulations of lumber, that it would require a week to search this old house thoroughly. Do you see, now, what I mean? Carmilla was looking charmingly. Nothing could be more beautiful than her tints. Her beauty was, I think, enhanced by that graceful languor that was peculiar to her. I think my father was silently contrasting her looks with mine, for he said:. As Carmilla would not hear of an attendant sleeping in her room, my father arranged that a servant should sleep outside her door, so that she would not attempt to make another such excursion without being arrested at her own door.
That night passed quietly; and next morning early, the doctor, whom my father had sent for without telling me a word about it, arrived to see me. Madame accompanied me to the library; and there the grave little doctor, with white hair and spectacles, whom I mentioned before, was waiting to receive me. We were standing, he and I, in the recess of one of the windows, facing one another.
When my statement was over, he leaned with his shoulders against the wall, and with his eyes fixed on me earnestly, with an interest in which was a dash of horror. He and the doctor talked for some time in the same recess where I had just conferred with the physician. It seemed an earnest and argumentative conversation.
The room is very large, and I and Madame stood together, burning with curiosity, at the farther end. Not a word could we hear, however, for they spoke in a very low tone, and the deep recess of the window quite concealed the doctor from view, and very nearly my father, whose foot, arm, and shoulder only could we see; and the voices were, I suppose, all the less audible for the sort of closet which the thick wall and window formed.
Accordingly I approached, for the first time a little alarmed; for, although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please. My father held out his hand to me, as I drew near, but he was looking at the doctor, and he said:.
Laura, come here, dear; now attend to Doctor Spielsberg, and recollect yourself. Is there still any soreness? It is necessary, to detect a symptom of the complaint under which you have been suffering.
That is the point at which the sense of strangulation begins? That is the only direction I need give for the present. It is indispensable. She does not come down till the afternoon. And then they repeated their directions to me and to Madame, and with this parting charge my father left us, and walked out with the doctor; and I saw them pacing together up and down between the road and the moat, on the grassy platform in front of the castle, evidently absorbed in earnest conversation.
The doctor did not return. I saw him mount his horse there, take his leave, and ride away eastward through the forest. Nearly at the same time I saw the man arrive from Dranfield with the letters, and dismount and hand the bag to my father. In the meantime, Madame and I were both busy, lost in conjecture as to the reasons of the singular and earnest direction which the doctor and my father had concurred in imposing. Madame, as she afterwards told me, was afraid the doctor apprehended a sudden seizure, and that, without prompt assistance, I might either lose my life in a fit, or at least be seriously hurt.
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