‘The ghost!’ he said to himself, with rather an awful feeling. ‘I knew there must be one in such a room—or perhaps the house is on fire, and some one has come to warn me.’ No; that wanderer through the deep of night had evidently no business with Mr. Clissold—nay, was unconscious of, or indifferent to, the fact of his existence. The figure slowly crossed the floor, with a light step, but a little sliding noise, as of a foot ill-shod—a slipper down at heel. It came full into the moonlight presently, between the bedstead and the two windows. ‘Ay, verily a ghost,’ thought Maurice, with a feeling like ice-cold water circulating slowly through every artery in his body. Never had he seen, or conceived within his mind, a figure more spectral, yet with a certain wild beauty in its ghastliness. He raised himself in his bed, still keeping well within the shadow of the curtains, and watched the spectre with eyes which seemed endowed with a double power of vision in the thrilling intensity of that moment. The spectre was a woman’s form; tall, slender—nay, so wasted that it seemed almost unnaturally tall. The face was death-pale in that solemn light, the eyes large and dark, the hair ebon-black and falling in long loose masses over the white garment, whose folds were straight as those of a winding-sheet. So might the dead, risen from a new-made grave, have looked. The figure went straight to one of the casements—that furthest from the bed, and at right angles with it—unfastened the hasp, and flung the window wide open. She drew a chair close to the open window, and kneeled upon it, resting her arms on the sill, and leaning out of the window, as if watching for some one to come, thought Maurice, that frozen blood of his beginning to thaw a little. ‘Those actions seem too deliberate and real for a ghost,’ he told himself. ‘Phantoms must surely be soundless. Now I heard the slipshod feet upon the floor. I heard the scrooping of the chair. I can see a gentle heaving of the breast under that shroud-like garment. Ergo my visitor is not a ghost. Who can she be? Not Mrs. Trevanard assuredly, nor the old blind grandmother, nor the buxom lass who waited on us at supper. I thought those were all the women kind in the house.’ A heavy sigh from that unearthly-looking intruder startled him, a sigh so long, so full of anguish, so like the utterance of some lost soul in pain! Difficult not to yield to superstitious fear as he gazed at that kneeling figure, with its long dark hair, and delicate profile, sharply outlined against the black shadow of the deep-sunk casement. Again came the sigh, despairing, desolate. ‘Oh, my love, my love, why don’t you come back to me?’ The words broke like a cry of despair from those pale lips. Not loud was the sorrowful appeal, but so full of pain that it touched the listener’s heart more deeply than the most passionate burst of louder grief could have done.