ding 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 grey-lined cloak a long grey 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 instant 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 found myself forced to believe
that our first visitor had been as real as the last; in other words, the
same woman.

But could I prove it? Could the seemingly impossible be made possible
and the unexplainable receive a solution satisfying to a rational mind?
I determined to make an effort to accomplish this, if only to relieve
the mind of my wife, who had not recovered her equanimity as readily as
myself.

Starting with the assumption above mentioned--that the woman who had
died in our presence was th