Conrad, in a mournful voice fit only for the anguished soliloquies of the sepulchre, would answer only, “You must rise now, child, and come with me.”

Accustomed to obeying her guardian in all matters, Theresa asked no further questions for the moment. When Conrad had withdrawn from her chamber, she arose, shying and trembling at the periodic ragings of the storm without. She dressed by the light of a single candle and performed what ablutions she could posthaste; and when she had done, she joined her elder cousin where he paced, brooding, beneath the sinister arches and macabre statuary that decorated the chateau’s massive front hall

To her astonishment, Conrad, himself already wrapped in a greatcoat, now extended to her her own warmest cloak.

“Surely, dearest cousin,” Theresa cried, thinking her guardian meant to have some bizarre amusement at her expense, “surely you cannot intend for us to make an excursion in this uproar, for it is as if the heavens themselves were to be swallowed by some terminal maelstrom!”

He replied nothing, but with a second, more insistent gesture, urged the mantle on her so that she had no choice but to receive it from him and clothe herself withal. Then, with an inarticulate groan that sent a tremor of premonitory terror over Theresa’s delicate limbs, Conrad hurled open the mansion’s ponderous door, and drew her out with him into the storm.

Their heads bowed against the raging gusts, Conrad and Theresa crossed the sere wasteland in a moonless blackness illuminated only by the forked daggers of lightning which at intervals cleft the sky in twain. The furious din of thunder which followed each such incendiary eruption only served to deepen the tremulous foreboding which step by step rose in Theresa’s heart, filling her innocent bosom with dread imaginings she knew not how to name.

“Whither go we, my dearest, most trusted guardian?” she ejaculated passionately from time to time. “Oh, in the name of that wife you sometime loved before a good and merciful God found fit to call her to his everlasting peace, ease my foolish virginal fears and tell me whither we go!”

But Conrad, staring into the distance with a disordered mien that did nothing to console his pavid charge, only tightened the grip he held upon her arm and hurried her through the night.

At length, Theresa raised her eyes to find they were approaching the solitary ruined tower of Castle Blaustein. A little gasp, lost in the commotion of the tempest, escaped her full lips as her eye fell on the disintegrating stones, which seemed to be made animate by the violent oscillation of the surrounding trees.

But now the frightened maiden turns her gaze aloft; now for the first time she spies a wavering glow of red light in the highest window of the tower, which was always heretofore plunged in the umbrageous obscurity of abandonment.