t her
dress was black and decent.

She was laid on our bed and every attention paid her. But she had been
grievously injured about the head and gradually but surely sank before
our eyes. Suddenly she roused and gave a look about her. It was a
remarkable one--a look of recognition and almost of delight. Then she
raised one hand and, pointing with a significant gesture into the empty
space before her, sank back and died.

It was a sudden ending, and, anxious to see its effect upon my wife, who
was standing on the other side of the bed, I glanced her way with some
misgiving. She showed more feeling than I had anticipated. Indeed her
countenance was a study, and when, under, the influence of my scrutiny
she glanced my way, I saw that something of deeper import than this
unexpected death in our rooms lay at the bottom of her uneasy look.

What that was, I was soon to know, for catching up from amid the folds
of the woman's gray-lined cloak a long gray veil which had fallen at
the bedside, she disposed it softly about the woman's face, darting me a
look full of significance.

"You remember the vision I had the morning when I was sick?" she
whispered softly in my ear.

I nodded, secretly thrilled to my very heart's core.

"Well, it was a vision of this woman. If she were living and on her
feet and wrapped, as I have shown you, in this veil, you would behold
a living picture of the person I saw passing out of this room that
morning."

"I shall not dispute you," I answered. Alas, I had myself perceived the
likeness the minute the veil had fallen about the pinched but handsome
features!

"A forewarning," whispered my wife, "a forewarning of what has this day
happened under our roof. It was a wraith we saw. Wilbur, I shall not
spend another night in these rooms."

And we did not. I was as anxious to leave as she was. Yet I am not
a superstitious man. As proof of it, after the first effect of these
events had left me, I began to question my first impressions and feel
tolerably ashamed of my past credulity. Though the phenomenon we
had observed could not to all appearance be explained by any natural
hypothesis; though I had seen, and my wife had seen, a strange woman
suddenly become visible in a room which a moment before had held no one
but ourselves, and into which no live woman could have entered without
our knowledge, something--was it my natural good sense?--recoiled before
a supernatural explanation of this, and I