feelings that can hardly have taken
any time to pass, or that passed almost simultaneously. My _very_ first
impulse this time was, as it had been the first time I saw her, to
explain in some natural way the presence before me. I think this says
something for my common sense, does it not? My mind did not readily
desert matters of fact, you see. I did not think of Fraser this time,
but the thought went through my mind, 'She must be some friend of the
servants who comes in to see them of an evening. Perhaps they have sent
her up to look at my fire.' So at first I looked up at her with simple
inquiry. But as I looked my feelings changed. I realised that this
was the same being who had appeared so mysteriously once before; I
recognised every detail of her dress; I even noticed it more acutely
than the first time--for instance, I recollect observing that here and
there the short tufty fringe of her shawl was stuck together, instead
of hanging smoothly and evenly all round. I looked up at her face. I
cannot now describe the features beyond saying that the whole face was
refined and pleasing, and that in the expression there was certainly
nothing to alarm or repel. It was rather wistful and beseeching, the
look in the eyes anxious, the lips slightly parted, as if she were on
the point of speaking. I have since thought that if _I_ had spoken, if I
_could_ have spoken--for I did make one effort to do so, but no audible
words would come at my bidding--the spell that bound the poor soul, this
mysterious wanderer from some shadowy borderland between life and death,
might have been broken, and the message that I now believe burdened her
delivered. Sometimes I wish I could have done it; but then, again--oh
no! a _voice_ from those unreal lips would have been too awful--flesh
and blood could not have stood it. For another instant I kept my eyes
fixed upon her without moving; then there came over me at last with an
awful thrill, a sort of suffocating gasp of horror, the consciousness,
the actual realisation of the fact that this before me, this _presence_,
was no living human being, no dweller in our familiar world, not a woman,
but a ghost! Oh, it was an awful moment! I pray that I may never again
endure another like it. There is something so indescribably frightful in
the feeling that we are on the verge of being tried _beyond_ what we can
bear, that ordinary conditions are slipping away from under us, that in
another moment reason or l