Roanoke of Roanoke Hall: A Romance — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Roanoke of Roanoke Hall. 75 Suddenly I heard close behind me a gentte sigh. My heart gave a great leap as I turned quickly and beheld a pale, thin face, the great, dark eyes of which were looking at me with disconcerting steadiness. I sprang to my feet with a gasp of anguished terror. Was I too going mad, or were the air-bred fantasies about to take shape before my eyes? This, I felt, in my distressed and terrified state of mind would send me shriek- ing through the house, a raving maniac. My greatest fears were speedily relieved, for I was soon assured that it was a mortal not a spiritual face upon which I looked, but this discovery gave me merely another reason for uneasiness. She was a woman of appa- rently some thirty years of age, very richly dressed, but her features wore such an ex- pression of haunting, anxious dread as raised in me uncontrollable shudderings. For full five minutes we sat staring into one another’s eyes as if overcome by that un- accountable fascination which I have heard some travellers in foreign countries aver is exercised by certain serpents over the birds that form their prey. At length she rose and comichbooks.com