me sound, she knew not what, she lifted her head and
looked through the open window intently, in the same way as we lift our
eyes and look sometimes just because another, a stranger perhaps, has
riveted his gaze upon us.

A moment more, and Ann saw some one come within the beams of her own
lamp outside of the window; the figure crossed like a dark, silent
shadow, but Ann thought she recognised Toyner. The outline of the
clothes that he had worn when she had seen him last just about this hour
on the previous night was unconsciously impressed upon her mind. A
shudder of fear came over her, and then she was astonished at the fear;
he might easily have done all that she had given him to do and returned
by this time. Yet why did he pass the window in that ghostly fashion and
show no sign of coming to the door? A moment or two that she sat seemed
beaten out into the length and width of minutes by the throbbing of her
nerves, usually so steady. She determined to steel herself against
discomfort. If Toyner had done his work and come home and did not think
it wise to visit her openly, what was there to alarm in that? Yet she
remembered that Toyner had spoken of being away for some indefinite
length of time. She had not understood why last night, and now it seemed
even more hard to understand.

As she sewed she found herself looking up moment by moment at the
window. It was not long before she saw the same figure there again,
close now, and in the full light. Her hands dropped nerveless upon her
knee; she sat gazing with strained whitened face. The outline of the
clothes she associated with the thought of Toyner, but from under the
dark hat her father's face looked at her. Not the face of a man she
thought, but the face of a spirit, as white as if it were lifeless, as
haggard as if it were dead, but with blazing life in the eyeballs and a
line like red fire round their rims. In a moment it was gone again.

Ann started up possessed with the desire to prove the ghostly visitant
material; passing through the door, she fled outside with her lamp.
Whatever had been there had withdrawn itself more quickly than she had
come to seek it.

She felt convinced now that her father was dead; she fell to imagining
all the ways in which the tragic end might have come. No thought that
came to her was satisfactory. What had Bart done? Why had his form
seemed to her so inextricably confused with the form of her father at
the moment of the appar