A long and awful silence ensued, during which the agonizing question occupied my mind, what was being done outside the door? The torture of the suspense was maddening; the silence was more harrowing than the footsteps themselves had been. I was soon to receive an appalling answer to the question.
The door--notwithstanding my firm belief that I had securely locked it--slowly and noiselessly opened. My heart beat wildly, but I held myself ready, so far as lay in my poor power, to meet the attack with which we were threatened. And now the door stood wide open, and I saw no form of man or woman. But gradually there shaped itself in the air the outline of a female shape, a shadow, which as I gazed grew more distinct, and yet was never quite vivid to my sight. It was the figure of a young girl, poorly dressed, with carpet slippers on her feet. Her hair was hanging loose, and the tattered remnants of a cap attached to it was an indication that her station in life was--or more properly speaking, had been--that of a domestic servant. Her face was white and wan, and her large gray eyes were fixed mournfully upon me. There was a dead beauty in their depths which seemed to speak of glowing hopes of youth prematurely blasted and destroyed, and, though the features of the apparition were but airy outlines, I could not fail to perceive that in a bygone time they had been comely and prepossessing.
More terrible than any form of living man or woman was this appalling spectacle as it stood, silent and still, upon the threshold. Had the bell I rang summoned it from the grave? For what purpose had it come? What did it require of me? It is probable that I should have mustered courage to ask some such questions as these, and indeed I was aware that my lips were moving, but no sound issued from them--my voice was gone; I could not utter an audible sound.
For several minutes, as it seemed to me, though it could not have been so long, did I continue to gaze upon the figure. I had directed a brief glance at its feet, but when my eyes traveled up to its face they became magnetized, as it were. The spell was broken by a movement on the ground, not proceeding from the apparition of the girl. I looked down, and there, gliding past the upright spectral figure, I saw creeping toward me a skeleton cat.